The Fire-Dwellers (26 page)
Authors: Margaret Laurence
Ladybird, ladybird
— Luke. I can’t not see you again. I have to. I didn’t even ask you exactly when you were going away. It isn’t so easy for me to organize, getting out to your place. Don’t you see? Stacey, have you forgotten what he told you? Let me tell you one simple fact, doll. He’s only ten years older than Katie. Lots of girls marry men who are ten years older than themselves. Okay, God. That’s enough. That’s enough for the bill. Aren’t you ever satisfied? Ease up on me, eh? Why did he ask me to go north with him? Why? What if I’d said yes? Would he have backed down? He knew I wouldn’t say yes.
Bluejay Crescent. Stacey pulls the Chev to a jarring halt and climbs out. Mac is coming down the steps out of the house.
Mac? I thought you
Mac runs one hand through his brush-cut hair. His tall lank frame communicates tiredness and something else which she cannot guess.
Mac? Is everything okay?
He looks at her then, and his voice is drab, drained, dry.
Stacey, he’s dead
Stacey crumples, and he grabs for her, pulling her up. Her eyes see nothing, not even Mac’s face, and she does not know she is speaking the one mourning word.
Ian Ian Ian
Mac takes her by the shoulders, to steady her, and she suddenly can feel him trembling, trying to control it and not succeeding.
Stacey – it’s not Ian. Christ, why should you have thought that? Ian’s asleep. He’s quite okay. It’s Buckle.
B
uckle? It’s Buckle?
Stacey cannot take in the reality of Mac’s words, or quite believe yet that Ian is safe and she herself essentially unpunished after all. She pulls away from Mac and looks at him as though suspecting she may read in his eyes some insane and subtle deception. But Mac’s face reveals only his open hurt.
Yes. They’ve just phoned me.
They?
The police. They want me to go to the the to identify
— He can’t say
morgue
. Oh my God – Buckle is dead. And my first thought was only relief that Ian was okay. Buckle can’t be dead. He can’t be. But he is. I never cared for him, but I wouldn’t have wished him any harm.
Stacey, seeing Buckle approach her, feeling him already inside her although they were still apart. Stacey wanting him, even there even in that room under the sightless eyes of the she-whale. Then the words he spoke, and the flung coins. Stacey, running down the linoleum-covered stairs, hating hating hating
— He won’t be able to tell Mac any more lies about me. That’s over. Serves him right. No – I’m not thinking that. I can’t. That’s terrible. I’m not like that. I’m not like that at all.
Mac, who never touches her in public in case somebody might see, suddenly puts his arms around her again and holds her cruelly tight, blind to the streetlights, blind to Bluejay Crescent, holding her not for her need now but for his own.
Stacey – he had an identification card on him and he had he had put me down as his next of kin.
She can feel his enormous effort not to break down. This one thing, the contrived kinship with its implications, he can bear less, almost, than Buckle’s death.
Mac oh Mac I’m sorry
— Now he can’t ever settle it with Buckle. They were friends for a long time and then they weren’t and that was my fault. I can’t bear that. No – yes, I can. I didn’t do it all – it was Buckle, too, and for reasons further back than mine. Why did Buckle say that to Mac about me? Now Mac won’t ever know, or be able to say he’s sorry he told Buckle to go to hell. If he is sorry. He
is
sorry. But he wouldn’t have been if Buckle hadn’t got killed. Got killed? I don’t even know what happened. Yes, I do, though.
Mac – how did it happen? It was on the road?
Oh sure. What else? Head-on collision. Both killed. At least Buckle was driving alone on that run.
Collision with another truck?
Yes.
With another truck like his? One of the big diesels? I mean I mean
I know. Yes. It was one like his.
I guess it would have had to be. He never played chicken except with
The highway shivering past, honking, obstacle-laden. Buckle riding the truck like a jockey. Buckle, for God’s sake, watch the road. His laughter, as he looked at the wheeling metallic ballet ahead.
I’ve never yet met a guy who didn’t give way
.
— I thought it was pure ego, superconfidence, when he said that. But maybe after all it was only disappointment.
Mac turns to go.
I told them I’d be right down.
Mac – why do you have to go tonight? Wouldn’t tomorrow be
I’d rather go now and get it over with.
I’m coming with you.
For a moment, she thinks he is going to refuse. Then he nods, and it is almost like a need-admitting sigh.
Okay, Stacey. Would you would you drive?
Sure. Of course.
They take the Chev instead of the Buick because Stacey is more familiar with it. They drive in silence. Stacey is on the point of speaking, several times, but she is afraid she may say the one wrong or fuselike word which may make something explode in his head or heart and break the control which he will need, which he would never forgive himself for not having in this final encounter.
A grey building, not far from the waterfront, where the cheap-wine and meths drinkers gurgle and cough out intolerable lives. Only one light burning. The courtrooms, coroner’s office, all black, shut, nobody home. Only the chapel of the violent dead holding its eternal hours, crash and stab not knowing nine to five. Stacey parks, and Mac puts a hand on her arm.
You stay here, Stacey.
I’ll come if you want me to. I mean it.
Yeh. I know. I – thanks. But no.
The car door opens and closes; the door of the building opens and closes. Stacey smokes and waits.
— I couldn’t have gone in. Yes, I could have. No, I couldn’t. Well, if I’d had to, I would have. And yet I’m curious as well. How do they stash them away? In grey-metal drawers like outsize filing cabinets, chilled for preservation? I don’t want to know. And yet I think of it, and what it would be like to be lying there, among them, one of them, not in a hospital with fragmentary hope but there with none, everything broken, drained out, gashed. Don’t be ridiculous, Stacey. As if you’d know, if you were. But somehow I always think I would know it, be able to see myself battered and wrecked, extinguished.
Cameron’s Funeral Home was never entered into by children. Stacey and her sister were forbidden. After Niall Cameron’s funeral, when Stacey was grown and had her own children, she went in, forced herself in, to banish the long-ago cold tenants once and for all, send them back to limbo or even heaven, put them under that dutifully flower-prinked earth where they had lain years. Everything was dusty and jumbled, bottles once booze mixed with the jars and potions of a profession old as the pharaohs. Her mother found her there.
He would never let me clean here, your father wouldn’t. He’d never let me tidy up. He said it would be a violation – I’ve never understood what he could have meant, but then he was always a little well you know
. Yes. And they’d turned and exited, locked up again, and Stacey went to the Liquor Commission and bought a mickey of rye but had to drink it in the bathroom and gargle with mouthwash after, and her mother said
You might consider that someone else might like to have a bath dear
. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.
— Buckle? Buckle – I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have gone with you that afternoon. It was only because because. I didn’t mean. Did it hurt you that Mac’s wife would? Naturally it did. What do I do about that? One more piece of baggage to lug along. I wish I could get rid of all of it. I wish I could start all over, with things simpler, really simple, none of this mishmash. Luke? I want to see him again. I can’t. I can’t want to. But I do. He’s not fifteen years younger. He is, though. Even if he weren’t, how could I get out? Out of where I am. All I want to do, God, is go away and throw all of this overboard. What about the kids? Yeh. And Mac? I don’t know. Whatever he’s feeling, I don’t want to know. But I do know. And I can’t get rid of that.
Mac opens the door and climbs in. He lights a cigarette and does not look at Stacey. She eases the car into motion as though she has to be careful not to have it jolt. They travel home in silence.
— I can’t say anything. God, don’t let him tell me. I don’t want to know.
Once home, they go to bed without yet speaking. Mac turns off the light on the bedside table. Then, almost immediately, he switches it on again and walks very quickly to the bathroom. Stacey, lying stretched straight and stiff as a brass curtain rail, hears him vomiting, flushing the toilet to mask the sound. Mercifully, no child wakens. Mac returns, crawls into bed, turns to her and puts his arms around her. He is crying now, the lung-wrenching spasms of a man to whom crying is forbidden. Shocked and frightened, she can only hold him, stroke his shoulders. Finally it subsides and he gets up and gropes for Kleenex and cigarettes. His voice is rough with self-condemnation.
Sorry.
Mac – you don’t have to be
Well. It was just that
He returns to bed and lights cigarettes for both of them, something he has not done in a long time. They sit up in bed with the ashtray between them. Stacey cannot say anything to enable him to speak, because she is afraid of what he will say. But after a while he tries again.
Stacey – you don’t mind me saying?
Of course not. How could I?
— I could. I do. But if he doesn’t say, it’ll be the worst thing that ever happened to him. What I lack is strength. Enough strength. Enough calm. Just give me enough to boggle through this one night, God, and I’ll never ask for anything again. Yeh – I know. You’ve heard all of that before.
Mac speaks in an untoned voice, at least to begin with.
His back was broken, so he looked twisted sort of and his head was was
Buckle Fennick, prince of the highway, superstitious as a caveman, Buckle who could swagger standing still, now lying stilled once and for all, Buckle with torn eyes unsocketed, blood wiped boredly away by attendants but smears still on the dark skin of his Indian-like face
Sh sh it’s all right
He hadn’t changed the identification card, Stacey. Not even after he phoned me that time. He left it the way it was. Me as his nearest
I know
Why? How could he? I don’t get it. You know, I never did that well by him.
You did so. You did.
I always kind of resented how much he came around.
You never said. He didn’t know. I didn’t, either.
Well, how could I say? It was something that happened a long time ago
It is a time they have seldom spoken about, Stacey and Mac. Their children will learn it from books.
Preceded by pipers, the men of the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders marched through the streets of Manawaka on their way overseas. Stacey, fifteen, watched them go, the boymen whom she soon might have known, perhaps married one if they had stayed. Nearly all the Manawaka boys of that age joined the same regiment. That was the war, to Stacey. She felt at the time ashamed of her own distance and safety. But after Dieppe, she could never again listen to the pipes playing
The March of the Cameron Men
. Even twenty years later, it remained a pibroch for them. The rough-fibered music forced mourning on her as though it had perpetually happened only the day before.
You mean in the war?
Yes. I didn’t understand it very well and I thought maybe I was just imagining things
What was it?
In Italy. Quite near the end. At that point we were cleaning up. You know, sweeping all before us, like. And maybe careless. Anyway, there was this bridge – funny, I can see it right now, a little brick bridge, those Roman arches, been there for centuries, I guess. Buckle and I were on supply transport, truck full of rations, spelled each other off. He was driving, and you know how he drives. Bat outa hell isn’t in it with him and how we got separated from the convoy I’ll never know because I hadn’t had any sleep the night before and he hadn’t either but it didn’t seem to affect him so much. I dozed off and when I wakened there we were on this godawful road all by ourselves and he said he had looked at the map and
figured a short cut which I thought was lunacy but try to tell him anything. Anyway, there we were at this bridge and I said let’s get out and have a look first and he said – God, Stacey, I can hear the way he said it – he said,
Okay, chickadee, you get out and walk because I’m driving across
. I was a kid – only just turned twenty, and I didn’t like to be reminded. It made me bloody angry, because he always thought he was so goddam tough and all that, and I guess I thought he was being patronizing, but I wasn’t going back on what I’d said, so I did get out. He went bowling on, not waiting for a check and
Go on – say it.
Well
Say it.
The bridge blew. Mined. It went before Buckle got properly onto it, or there wouldn’t have been much of him left to pick up, but the truck was thrown and flung half into the river, which wasn’t that deep. I hauled him out. He had three broken ribs and concussion – I only learned this later – at the time I thought every bone in his body was broken. He kept bleeding from his mouth and nose. He was unconscious. I thought he’d had it. I thought he’d choke with the blood in his throat, so I – but I didn’t really know what the hell to do. After what seemed about a year, I found a farmer with a donkey cart, and finally we got back to the other road and met up with the last of the convoy. I don’t know, Stacey – that trek in the cart, it was weird, like it was only being imagined or some such thing. It wasn’t that I hadn’t seen worse things – nothing like that. But Buckle kept coming to, just for a few seconds at a time, and from the way he looked it wasn’t only because he was in pain it was something else entirely
Mac – what bugs you?
Mac stubs out his cigarette and lights another. She can now see him, her eyes having adjusted to the dark. His face shows nothing. His voice is so plain as to be almost casual.