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Authors: David Adams Richards

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BOOK: Nights Below Station Street
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Over everything in town rose the hospital, the station, the church, and the graveyard. Below, the river rested, beyond
the woods and through the centre of town. Old buildings were being slowly replaced, being torn away, their steps faded, their pane-glass windows looking glib in the winter light.

As time went on, the doctor felt less a part of things and more by himself. Some days he would see as many as one hundred patients and find himself being rude to almost everyone. Things were changing. Now, nurses coming out of university talked about units of time, and time-units per patient. This not only bothered the old doctor, but made him sceptical of everything. He found it more and more irritating as he went on his rounds. He didn’t like the nurses or the nurses’ union, and had no love for unions in general. In a strange almost impractical way the nurses liked him a good deal, and not because he was overly kind in his comments. He went about declaring things. He declared that people should be shot if they pestered him about prescriptions for “little” ailments; and whenever a “disaster” happened with his sister-in-law Clare, he would say: “Did a disaster happen? Well, good.”

The doctor bothered those he most loved, and argued with those he most cared about, but was obsessively polite with those he didn’t like. With Clare and Adele, for instance, he always argued. No matter what Adele said, he would contradict. One night last fall she and her mother came down to the community centre to play bingo. Adele looked as tiny as ever with a big rainbow-coloured hat on her head. There was a fierce wind against the top of the trees, the pastures were trampled and the wagon roads already covered in snow. Below, the river widened into the bay; they could see the outside of barns, and in the houses they could see lights.

Since it was November, he began to talk about Armistice Day. Adele stood near them, listening.

“The world’s going to blow up and there’ll be another world war by next year,” she said, sniffing.

“I hope so,” the doctor said, looking at Adele, with snow suddenly blowing down from the trees, while Rita stood alongside them.

“Well, I support peace – and at least everyone else in the world is in for peace, except for a dozen or so who are into war,” Adele said, holding onto her rainbow-coloured hat, and speaking up as if to be heard over the wind, and the outside door of the community centre banging.

The building was an old schoolhouse that they’d put on skids and had hauled down here a few summers before. Then Joe and a few of the men redid the inside and put a foundation under it. They had built an outdoor arena so the children wouldn’t have to skate on the river, and they had horse-haulings behind it, where a team of horses was made to pull heavier and heavier loads. For some reason the doctor avoided horse-haulings until the last moment and then came over to stand by the fence and drink rum. Everyone considered the doctor a drunk because he drank with them – which they thought a doctor would not do unless he was a drunk.

“I’m not in for peace at all,” the doctor said. “Peace won’t do anything to help the world, as a matter of fact it will not do a thing – and we shouldn’t be putting a lot of stock in it.”

Then, with his face red and his head nodding to everyone who went past him, he got angry. Rita smiled and the doctor became troubled. First, because this was the first bingo Adele had come to in the evening and she was all dressed up, and her knees were shaking from the cold night wind while the bulb over the door cast light on the frozen grass. Second, because she had won a prize and held it in her tiny hands. Third, because Rita had told her
not to be rude, when the doctor felt he was as obstinate as she was.

In the mornings people would come to his house to be treated. And Clare would take their Medicare numbers and make appointments. They would sit along two benches in his office, and he would come in through the other door, peer at them, and wave his hand to someone to follow him in.

“Don’t be shy with me,” he would be heard telling an Indian woman from down river. “I mean I’m just feeling for the baby’s head. It’s dropped down but it’s not in position yet – so don’t go driving about bumpy roads so you’ll go into labour – no it’s not for a while yet. …”

Then he would wash his large red hands, and come out again, his eyes piercing through his thick glasses:

“Make her another appointment for next Thursday,” he would say.

Every now and then Gloria Basterache would come in about some complaint. Everyone could tell that she made the cross old man nervous; because whenever he gave her a check-up he would call Clare in with him.

After supper he would go to the hospital.

Some nights he would go in and out of the hospital three or four times. No one ever knew what floor he was on, where he was going to. If Dr. Armand Savard was in the hospital, Doctor Hennessey would go in and out glumly. If Dr. Savard or Dr. McCeachern got together – both youthful, both in high spirits – the doctor would become more and more glum.

Savard and McCeachern thought the old man was like
this for a variety of reasons. They supposed he was like this most of all because no one paid any attention to him anymore – not like they paid attention to themselves. The treatments he prescribed a lot of times were no longer valid. And their lives were so much better organized than his. Besides, Armand felt the old man was prejudiced against the French, and often waited for him to show his hand in that regard. Savard would look over at McCeachern, or someone else, and say: “The war – the war.” And amid muffled laughter, he would tap his forehead.

When he went home to his sister-in-law Clare, whom he could never tell he loved so she’d ended up marrying his brother, he complained to her that everything was different and he may as well retire. And then in the same breath, as if holding it against himself, he would berate all people who retired, and he would say also that retirement was only the mandate of the young, which she, sitting in her plaid skirt and bobby socks, did not understand. Since his brother had died, they lived together in the same gigantic old house, built like many of the other old farmhouses, below Madgill’s garage. It sat back off the road, on the left of the power-line, with green shutters, and an old porch that had three or four faded wicker chairs. There was a barn. There was some wood. There was a nailed-down coal chute, with metal stripes crossing it. The doctor’s office was on the right-hand side facing the road. He had treated the whole roadway for thirty years.

Nothing was the same now, he would tell her, and yet he would say everything was the same and not one thing was different. Was it not the same thing with his nephew Ralphie as with him, and was it not the same with Vera, his niece, as it was with everyone else. Ha. Then almost spitefully he would shake his head so you could see the space between his grey hair and the collar of his shirt, and the
light casting off from the snowbanks relegated to the evening air. He would take some chewing tobacco and clamp it down between his back teeth, and then he would spit.

“How do you mean?” Clare would ask.

“I mean, everything is the same and always has been and always will be,” he would say, walking away.

Adele had begun to dye her hair and wear the tight jeans and shirts she had seen her friends wear. Yet she was never happy with how she tried to look. She felt she didn’t look as good as other kids, and she was continually trying different fashions and then abandoning them. She would walk about in tight jeans showing her skinny bum, and then just as suddenly she would go a week or two without wearing jeans at all, but only dresses or skirts.

One of the memories she had of her family was that her mother picked blueberries, standing in her skirt against the background of trees that had been seared by a forest fire, and one of the men said her father couldn’t lift a boulder out of the ground. Joe stood in his blue suit, coming from church, his shoes hidden, his shoulders catching the shadows of the tree’s waving motion on his back and hair. Joe lifted the boulder, put it on his shoulder, and then with the other hand picked up her mother, and Rita started crying.

She often criticized her mother for being foolish enough to live with him. It seemed to her that if her mother wanted to be a fool now, and wanted to keep kids for other people – this
to Adele was an insult – and wanted to make her life like she did, then that was fine, but she herself would not have any part in it, and when she grew up she would be quite different from her mother, and by being quite different, she assumed she would be better.

Therefore at home everything depressed her. The idea of Rita and the children depressed her. That Milly was off the wall, and needed to be tied to the mattress so she wouldn’t run outside at night, depressed her. That her father had three tattoos on him, depressed her. That told you everything.

They once took her father to jail. It was in the evening and she went up to the window and looked in at him. And when he looked at her she yelled: “So – will they hang you or what?” Then she got giddy, stepped on a nail which punctured her sneaker, and fell flat on her face.

Adele’s nerves were bad. She would not sit at the table if Milly ate beside her. She could not eat her food unless she had Kleenex piled all about her plate, to keep off Milly’s breath.

When she got a bottle of pop, she would take a sip or two of it and put it in the fridge, with a note on it that read:
“MILLY – I SPIT IN THIS!”

Sometimes she would complain about having nothing to wear, and Joe would say: “When’s yer birthday, Delly?”

“Pardon me?”

“When’s your birthday?”

“You know’s well as I do – April Fool’s is my numbskull birthday as I’m always getting teased bout it one way or the other from all sides of the world.”

“Well, that’s not too far off, is it?”

“Pardon me once more?”

“That’s not too too far away?”

“Million zillion years, there about.”

“Well we’ll see what happens April Fool’s.”

“Salt gets changed for sugar and something foolishly stupid is written about in the paper about something foolish and stupid,” Adele said, taking a Scotch cookie and popping it into her mouth.

Then she would walk about the house shrugging at what her mother said, or floating in and out of rooms like a ghost with her history or math books in her hands, or sitting on the window-sill waiting for Ralphie to telephone her.

In early March, Joe had gone into the hospital for a week and had come out, and was recuperating from the tests he’d had. These tests seemed to always come to nothing; and there was never anything they could really put their finger on.

Adele would end up arguing with him, and it could start over anything.

“How are you today?”

“Not so bad.”

“Well why do you not go outside or something?” “I doubt if I could walk real well right at this moment, Delly.”

“Well, let me rub your back for you.”

“No – go on – it’s alright.”

“Don’t be so goddamn stubborn, Joe – let me rub your goddamn back like I used to!”

Then she would sit across from him and brood in a sort of silent, judgmental fashion. The house was filled with the scent of cigarettes. And she would tell him, with her cold face in the damp spring light, that she knew he didn’t like Ralphie – she could tell, and that was the one thing about him that she could tell.

BOOK: Nights Below Station Street
6.17Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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