Swann (24 page)

How were these daily domestic deprivations, a washing machine, a refrigerator, to be balanced beside Angus Swann’s new silver-clad silo? Because it was obvious even to the disinterested eye that the Swann farm didn’t merit such a dignifying emblem. Silos belonged on prosperous dairy farms, keeping company with roomy, wide-raftered barns and graceful rows of elms. But not on the old Swann farm, or rather, the old Swann
place
, for it was an exaggeration to call this tumbledown habitation a farm. The crippled rail fences, the teetering shed, the broken machinery rusting in the weedy, chicken-maddened yard, the sopping clothes perpetually dripping from a sagging line, the shame of cardboard over a broken bedroom window—and all this presided over by a new concrete-and-steel silo paid for, it was said, in cash.

It mustn’t be thought that the Swann place resembles in any way those paintings of run-down farms so popular in suburban livingrooms during the late fifties and early sixties, a fad that quickly bankrupted itself, for where can decay go but down toward deeper decay? In the silvery dilapidated farms of popular art there’s little suggestion of the real sourness of old back sheds or the reek of privies or the sucking mud between house and barn. Even if you could pry open the door and enter the kitchen of one of these houses, chances are you would get no glimpse of that kind of cheap patterned linoleum that soon flaked underfoot and somehow never got replaced. One of Mary Swann’s poems,
one of those published by Frederic Cruzzi after her death, and one that is a puzzle to scholars goes:

Rose Hindmarch has visited the Swann farmhouse twice. The first time was with Sarah Maloney and Homer and Daisy Hart, but they didn’t go inside that time, just walked around the yard and stood for a few minutes on the porch. The second time was two years ago when she was setting up the Mary Swann Memorial Room in the old high school in Nadeau. Russell Donegal, the good-natured, semi-alcoholic real-estate agent who operates out of both Nadeau and Westport, drove her out there in his Oldsmobile (a cold Sunday afternoon, much like today) and let her wander at will through the house.

That, of course, was during the time when the house was up for sale, before the new owner came up from the States and bought the place. (“Who the hell wants to buy a house where a murder’s been done?” So said Russell Donegal.) Rose moved silently from room to room, walking hesitantly on tiptoe: the verandah (where Mrs. Swann had once stood smiling into a camera), the kitchen with its suspended smell of cold and its torn linoleum, beneath which Professor Lang had found a number of poems that had been hidden away. The sitting-room had plastic sheeting on its windows. There was a crude, railingless stairway leading to two upstairs bedrooms. Russell followed close behind Rose, and she was both flustered and relieved to have him there.

“Well,” he said at last in his meaty salesman’s voice. “What d’ya think, Rose?”

She waved a limp arm, then asked boldly, “What happened to everything?” To herself she said: What did you expect? The word that floated to her lips, like a child’s balloon bobbing crookedly to the ceiling, was not the word
squalor
and not
trash
. Those are middle-class words, heavy with judgement. (And by now you will have realized that Rose Hindmarch lacks the spirit, the haemoglobin, for judgement. She is afflicted with social anaemia—though she does possess something else, which might be termed
acuity.) Poor
is the word that came to her,
poor
. A spare, descriptive, forgiving term, thin as a knife blade and somewhat out of fashion.
Poor
.

In Mary Swann’s house there were a few straight chairs, a painted kitchen table, another table in the sitting-room with an old Westinghouse radio on it, a single cheap armchair missing one arm, iron pipe beds in the bedrooms, and old cheap bureaus of the kind that are
not
stripped down and sold as antiques at the Antique Barn in Westport.

“Where is everything?” she asked Russell Donegal, and he replied with a level grunt, wagging his broad, empurpled-with-whisky face, “This is it. Such as it is.” Then he said, “We’ve got a saying in the business that a house sells faster when it’s furnished. Well, this place is an exception. I’d like to clear the damn place right out.”

“I suppose some of the things, the family mementoes and so on, went to Mrs. Swann’s daughter in California.” Rose ventured this hypothesis with only half a heart. Except for the two photographs and the drawerful of crocheted doilies, there appeared to be no family mementoes. Unless Professor Lang, when Russell had showed him through the house, carted off more than a sheaf of crumpled poems.

“Nope,” Russell said. He lit a cigarette with a match struck directly on the kitchen wall. “He just took what
he found under the linoleum. This is the way she was. Except”—he gave his goofy laugh—“except for the blood. We had that cleaned up before the place went on the market. Needless to say.”

“Of course,” Rose said. Then she added with a tincture of shame, “I suppose there was an awful lot of blood.”

“The old boy was just about emptied out when they found him. Every last drop. Head wounds are the worst for blood, you know, and he’d put the bullet right through his. So you can imagine the mess. Of course there was no telling how
long she’d
been dead.”

A week, the coroner had reported.

And so Rose was forced to use her imagination when it came to furnishing the Mary Swann Memorial Room . She was fortunate that the Nadeau town council had appropriated $300 for acquisitions (she embraced that wonder-word
acquisitions)
and that a second grant from Ottawa brought the amount up to $500. Russell Donegal encouraged her to help herself to anything in the house, saying she was welcome to the lot for all he cared. He’d thank her, he said, to tote off what she could. Rose took the kitchen table, two of the better kitchen chairs (pressbacks, Daisy Hart informed her) and a few cooking utensils, pathetic things with worn handles and a look of hard use. She left behind the bent rusty carving knife and the nickel-plated forks and spoons.

As for the other articles in the Memorial Room, she bought them from the Antique Barn and from Selma’s Antiques in Kingston: a pretty wooden turnip masher, a wood and glass scrubbing board, a cherrywood churn, a fanciful, feminine iron bedstead, and a walnut bookcase and the set of tattered dull-covered books (Dickens, Sir Walter Scott) that came with it. At an auction in the
town of Lyndhurst she bought three old quilts and a set of blue-and-white china and a framed picture of a cocker spaniel. A measure of pride flowed around her not-quite-secret purchases, and she watched with joy, with creative amazement, as the room took shape, acquiring a look of authenticity and even a sense of the lean, useful life that had inhabited it. Yes, Rose could imagine the figure of Mary Swann bent over the painted table scratching out her poems by the light of the kerosene lamp. (The table had been repainted, and the kerosene lamp she found at a rummage sale in Westport.)

If you suggest to Rose that her room has been wrenched into being through duplicity, through countless small acts of deception, she will be sure to look injured and offer up a pained denial. These articles, after all, belong to the
time
and the
region
of which Mary Swann was a part, and therefore nothing is misrepresented, not the quilts, not the china, not even the picture of the cocker spaniel. She may admit, though, that she has considered, then rejected, the idea of placing a small card in the doorway advising visitors that the contents are
similar
to those found in Mary Swann’s rural home. But quite rightly she has decided that such a notice would be a distraction and that it might inject a hint of apology, of insufficiency. (The charm of falsehood is not that it distorts reality, but that it creates reality afresh.) With all her heart Rose would like to have on display the papers found by Professor Lang under the linoleum—and the Parker 51 fountain pen that Mary Swann was reputed to have owned; but this article (according to Russell Donegal who heard it from Cecil Deacon, the trust officer in Kingston who
handled the estate) was sent as a keepsake to Frances Swann Moore in California.

The missing pen is a void that sucks away at Rose. A number of times she has been on the verge of writing to Frances in California to ask if she would care to donate or at least lend her mother’s pen to the museum. Meanwhile Rose is keeping a lookout at local flea markets for one of a similar vintage.

It is a mystery why Angus Swann hacked his wife Mary to death in December of 1965. Homer Hart and Rose Hindmarch, driving by the old Swann farm, discuss the various theories. Angus Swann was a violent man. No one ever denied that. It was known he butchered his poultry crudely with an axe and bragged about it. Also that he once went into a rage at the Red and White over the price of a ballpeen hammer. Another time Mary Swann was seen in town with a bruise over one eye and an arm in a sling. Some people say he was jealous of her poetry, the little bit of local celebrity that came her way, and that he begrudged her the postage when she sent her poems to local newspapers. But there is no proof of any of this, and other people say that, on the contrary, he was proud of her in his way, that it was he who gave her the fountain pen for a birthday present.

The last person to see her alive—other than her husband and possibly the bus driver—was Kingston publisher Frederic Cruzzi. According to the testimony Mr. Cruzzi gave the coroner after Mrs. Swann’s body was discovered, he was sitting quietly at home one wintry afternoon when she suddenly appeared at his doorway. She thrust a bulky bag at him and, kind man that he was, he invited her inside and read through the loose sheets of paper that constituted a manuscript, later to form the bulk of
Swann’s Songs
.

It was said he realized at once that the poems were
remarkable. “I’d like to publish these, “he told her, but she seemed ill at ease, puzzled, anxious about getting her bus home. The bus driver, not the regular driver, but a holiday replacement, half remembers dropping her at the side road near the Swann farm, and then, presumably, she walked into her house and was bludgeoned to death by her husband.

Rose came close to telling Homer as they drive along the back road that she sometimes dreams about this scene of horror—mazy dreams of splashing blood and thin-walled vessels hacked open and strewn on kitchen linoleum.

Homer said into the silence, “It must have been something pretty bad to set him off like that. Well, we’ll never know.”

“No,” Rose says, and gazes at the glare-filled hills.

She doesn’t tell Homer—she has never told anyone—that it was she who suggested to Mrs. Swann, in their one and only extended conversation, that she should show her poems to Frederic Cruzzi. Rose had read about Frederic Cruzzi and his wife and their publishing company, Peregrine Press, in
Library News
. Peregrine Press was interested in regional poets whose work was not sufficiently recognized. When Mary Swann came into the library one December day in 1965 to return a book, looking feverish and wearing her running shoes and her terrible coat and with her hair matted and uncombed, Rose was stricken by the wish to do her a kindness. She pulled the article about Frederic Cruzzi out of her clipping file and showed it to Mrs. Swann. “You should mail him some of your poems,” she urged her. “Or better yet, go and see him.”

Mrs. Swann looked dubious, but Rose detected a nervous stirring of interest and cut out the article then and there with her library shears—not without a stitch of regret—and placed it inside the book. It was the last book Mary
Swann ever borrowed from the Nadeau library,
The Ice Palace
, by Edna Ferber.

It might be thought that Rose Helen Hindmarch suffers anguish over this episode and the part she may, inadvertently, have played in Mary Swann’s murder. But oddly enough she doesn’t. She thinks about it from time to time, and wonders about it, but feels no sense of responsibility.

What protects her from guilt is the simple balm of modesty, of self-effacement. She cannot possibly be the one who set in motion the chain of events that led to Mary Swann’s death since she has never been capable of setting anything in motion. Never mind her work in the town office, in the library, and in the museum—she has always known, not sensed, but
known
, that she is deficient in power. So many have insisted on her deficiency, beginning with her dimly remembered soldier father who failed to come back home to Nadeau to take his place as her parent, and her grandmother who told her, moving leathery gums stretched with spittle, that she had the worst posture ever seen in a young girl, and her mother who said looks weren’t everything, and a teacher back in the early grades who said she was a silly goose; and then Daisy Hart who noticed the hair on her chin, and Dr. Thoms who slyly inquired about her libido, and the United Church God who deserted his switchboard, and Morton Jimroy who, except for one little letter, has not answered any of her perky little notes or cards, and Jean Elton who has never come back to share her bed, and even Homer Hart who has not had the goodness to inquire about the Swann symposium for some time now, and the seditious blood that is pouring out of her day after day after day, making her weaker and weaker so that she can hardly think—all this has interfered with her life and made her deficient in her own eyes, and it is this that mercifully
guards her against self-recrimination, from believing she is someone who might possibly have played a part in the death of the poet Mary Swann. Rose is a person powerless to stir love and so she must also be powerless in her ability to hurt or destroy.

Rose very often gets postcards from vacationing friends and neighbours: cards that come all the way from White Rock, B.C., or New York City and, of course, from Daisy Hart in Florida. She also receives a fair number of small, dainty pastel envelopes containing shower invitations or thank-you notes or the like. And then there’s her official mail: from the National Library Association, from the Department of Cultural Affairs, from the OATC (Ontario Association of Township Clerks) or from the CCUC (Committee of Concern for the United Church).