Poached Egg on Toast

As a child, I loved to sit around the dinner table after a meal and listen to stories. I was surrounded by, entertained by, ambushed by stories. It was my understanding that life doled out its portions in stories. No doubt this had something to do with the fact that I have a large extended family. The more relatives one has, the more life stories one hears.

When I was four, my parents moved our family from eastern Ontario to a small village in western Quebec. Our house was located at the edge of the fast-flowing Ottawa River. After the move, we seemed to be on the catch-up end when it came to hearing family news. Celebratory events and tragedies were narrated from the lips of visitors. Mood was an important part of each telling—excitement, commiseration, mystery, surprise. Stories could be bizarre and, to a child, baffling. Despite the fact that I had four siblings, I managed to be alone a good part of the time, exploring the river’s edge, watching, listening, learning. It was against this backdrop that I began to create my own stories.

Two decades later, when I started to write fiction, I was immediately attracted to the short story. I read everything I could find in the genre. The writers I most admired were those with the finest observational powers, the ones who trusted their readers, who used understatement, who hinted and suggested, and left room for the reader’s imagination. I was also fortunate enough to meet W.O. Mitchell when I was starting out, and I was greatly encouraged by him.

I learned from non-judgmental Chekhov, with his ability to brushstroke a single image and transfer a vivid picture to the reader’s mind. I read Heinrich Boll because he was a great storyteller. I loved the works of Virginia Woolf because of the fluidity of her prose, the sense of illusion, the intimacy and rhythm of emotion. I read American and Irish and New Zealand and Czech and South American writers, and I read the literature of my own country and knew that it was somehow about me. At the same time, I was mothering two young children, inventing stories for them, listening carefully to the stories they themselves were creating.

During a time when we lived in a small German village near Heidelberg, I was writing a letter to my sister in Canada, and asked my seven-year-old daughter if she had a message to send. Her voice dropped into what I recognized as
story mode
, and she dictated: “I grow fairly easily. First I was born. Then I turned one, then two, then three…” and so on, until she reached seven.

My son, at the age of eight, told me while tying his shoelaces—a serious moment—”You know, already I have stories to tell my children. Just like you.” It was clear that, for all of us, story was in the blood and the bone.

The story genre is an exacting one for a writer, a genre with no real rules. For me, each story begins because of unlikely connections. I stow away images and sensory impressions and overheard fragments and somehow, out of the tumble of memory, one thing connects with another to suggest story. The Oxford definition of
stow away
is to “place a thing where it will not cause an obstruction.” It’s a perfect definition, I think. Writers stow many things until one image nudges another and creates excitement. But that’s only the beginning. Each story holds the mystery of its own creation.

Of the new and selected stories in this collection, “P’tit Village” is the first story I sold for publication. The others were written over the next twenty-seven years. Some of the settings are drawn from places I’ve lived and travelled. Some are sea stories, set on Canada’s east coast, an area I’ve visited almost every year since my children were young. I have grouped the European stories together, as well as what I think of as the war stories.

No matter what the story, my interest is in the human condition, the perpetually amazing range of struggles and delights that make up human behaviour. I have always had an underlying preoccupation with theme, but if my characters are preoccupied it is with trying to recover their balance when life knocks them over. And my greatest wish? That I will never lose the fragile, tentative strand of hope I wake with each morning before I sit at my writing table. Every day, I tell myself, Today, today might be the day the wild horses will break in.

FRANCES ITANI
April 2004
.

In the morning, he heard their cries. He lay on his bed and for a long time thought of nothing, allowing the cries to wash over him like waves, soothing. And when the sun rose, silvery on the water, he stood at his window in the attic room to which he had carried a narrow spring bed. Zeta had objected to this, knowing that if he took a mattress to the attic, he would also sleep there. But he had taken it anyway, ignoring her. There was a table there, too, a lamp, and electricity. He had run an extension cord up the attic stairs—Pa’s cord. He smiled as he thought of it. Morgan, the undertaker, had left an extension behind when Clayton’s father died and they had needed a lamp up front by the coffin. Clayton had returned to the empty room alone after Pa was carried out and, seeing the forgotten extension on the floor, picked it up and pocketed it, no hesitation. Morgan’s fee had been too high anyway. And Clayton felt a foolish affection for the cord. It had supplied Pa’s last light, hadn’t it?

At first, Clayton could not see their wide dark backs. But when the double blow, the high bushy blow, rose above the waterline, and when he heard them answering one to another, he felt the quick surge of joy. He knew with certainty they were humpbacks, feeding and playing in the Gulf. Frisking on their way north.

It had been seven years since he’d seen a whale, although last year he’d come close. He’d heard them through the fog. He’d even stood with raised binoculars many winter hours at the attic window, hoping to catch a glimpse of them on their return, late December, early January. They seemed to stay closer to shore on the home journey, though for what reason Clayton could only guess. Currents? Or maybe food supply. Perhaps, if this was a good year, he’d see the sperm whales, too. Old bulls that left their families every summer and headed for polar waters. These he would recognize by their forward slanting blows and their deep moaning sighs. When he was a boy, he’d learned to differentiate. His father had taught him what to look for. Just as Clayton, in turn, had taught his own children—William, Latham, and his daughter, Maureen. But he and Zeta were alone now. And there were fewer whales. Most years, he saw none at all. You could thank the ships for that, and the whalers, and the oil spills. What was the use even thinking about it?

Clayton dressed and went downstairs. He shook the fire, waking Zeta, and she entered the kitchen still fastening the tie of her maroon dressing gown. She was silent, and put bowls on the table while he filled the kettle.

“I’ll be doing the road fill today,” he said.

She didn’t answer; she was sullen and hostile. She hated him taking the bed to the attic, but what did she do if he stayed in the house, if he did sleep in their room? She ignored him. She wanted to have him around, but didn’t pay any attention when he was there. She didn’t know how to please him anymore. For that matter, what did he do to please her? Nothing, that he could think of.

But despite the fleeting misgivings he had about his relations with Zeta and where they had gone wrong, after breakfast, Clayton was aware of the spring in his step when he left the house, binoculars swinging from his neck. He headed for the shed to get the tractor, and felt Zeta at his back, standing at the half-open screen, though she did not call after him. He hitched to the tractor a low wagon he and Latham had built to hold sand and gravel. Latham had his own farm now, and sons of his own. Clayton sat high on the tractor and bumped along the knotted dirt road that crossed his fields and led along the swells of land, rising, falling, to the creek bed that emptied into the pond, and even farther to the cliffs and then, to the gently sloping beach that tilted into the Gulf. It was the kind of day that made him push back his hat and look around in every direction. Clear skies, an occasional puff of cloud on the horizon, gulls soaring high, the early summer sea lapping and calm, barely a noise. He had to hush, remind himself to listen, face the slightness of the waves to watch rather than hear them as they slipped on shore.

It was at the creek bed that he began to dig for fill. The road was so full of holes, it was dangerous to have the tractor on it. He would work all week, a little each day. He began to toss sand with his shovel, listening to the spatter against the floor of the shallow wagon. He thought of how he’d always kept a mound of coarse sand at the side of the house for cleaning the bottoms of kitchen pots—especially in summer when the pots were black from the wood stove. He and Zeta and the children used to kneel at the edge of the mound, rotating pots and pans back and forth against the grating, cleansing sand, until the bottoms and part way up the sides were scratched and silvery. Clayton thought about Pa’s cord again, and smiled. If that were the worst thing he had to live with, he’d have a clear conscience indeed. But being a man who still had an occasional song in his heart, there were, of course, other things.

On the northwest edge of Clayton’s farm, along the cliff, stood a skimpy row of unused one-room cabins. Beside those stood an abandoned barn, both doors off. He could see through to the water, in one doorway and out the next—by standing in the field above it. Inside, there were rotting timbers and tangled grass, but the roof was sound and the ladder nailed firmly to the wall. It was this ladder that Clayton climbed for the first time in fifteen years, his binoculars still on a strap about his neck. At the top, he tested, and saw that he could walk a wide beam from one end to the other, even though the attic floor had fallen through. He could perch on a cross beam and look out either way, north to the beginning expanse of ocean, and south up the slope to the house.