The Western Light Page 22

  Disappointed, I climb back in the car. My aunt doesn’t glance up. She didn’t get out to look at the view the way she did in the summer when she was seeking a better understanding of things. Instead, she sits in the front seat, smoking her head off and frowning. For her, the Bay is something to avoid; while for me the Bay is a giant clock that measures the way time slips through our lives. Today the clock says spring is just a piece of nonsense dreamed up to keep us going.

  MORLEY’S NEXT CALL IS TOWANDA Lodge. Two cottages away, the car’s engine conks out and we have to walk down the old lumber road to the lodge. I’m soon thirsty and hot inside my snowsuit, because it’s hard going. The temperature is above freezing, and the thick, mushy snow is pierced with small holes where water droplets have fallen from the trees.

  Outside the lodge, I spot fresh boot prints in the melting snow. “I guess Old Man Beaudry’s had visitors,” I exclaim. Morley nods, and my aunt lights up a Sweet Cap. The quick, nervous way she smokes suggests she’s keyed up about something. “Louisa?” Morley says. She hurries after him while I hang back to examine the tracks. Some of them go down the small incline that leads to the storage space under the lodge. It occurs to me that the basement would be a good place for somebody to hide. What if John’s there? If he was, I can tell him I know about his wife throwing the match.

  There’s a knock at a window. Behind the glass, my father is signalling for me to come inside. I do as I’m told. Away from the March sunshine, the lodge feels dank and chilly, although its thick walls should keep out the cold. It was built when the land was logged for white pine, but maybe Old Man Beaudry is too sick to stoke the woodstove. In the kitchen, my father shows us how to work the hand pump and then he disappears down the hall. Through the pine board walls we can hear Old Man Beaudry complaining about his stomach. It sounds like my father is going to be here a while.

  My aunt pumps us cups of water. “Mary, I want to go outside and look around,” she says, tossing her drink down. “You stay here and rest.”

  “I don’t want to sit here by myself.”

  “You won’t be alone. Your father’s down the hall.” She tips her head towards the sound of voices coming through the wall. Unexpectedly, the lodge falls silent except for the noise of a door banging outside in the wind.

  “Can I come too? This old place gives me the creeps.”

  “No. Not this time.”

  I freeze. Somewhere in the building, there’s the low, hollow sound that makes me think of a rubber plunger going into a human chest. The noise repeats itself.

  “John’s here! I heard him cough.”

  “Don’t be silly,” my aunt says. “He’s probably miles away from here by now.”

  “It’s him. I know it is. And I’m going to find him.” I hobble off and she lets out an exasperated sigh and follows me down the hall.

  OUTSIDE, THE AFTERNOON SHADOWS ARE deepening to a dark powder blue, as if somebody has been painting the sky on the half-melted snow. It’s a trick of winter light at this time of year. At first, I can’t see well in the refracted glare, but I find the tracks again. Little Louie and I follow them down to the storage space under the lodge. The boot prints are the size of a man’s foot. “What if they belong to John?” I ask, imagining the pleasure in his dark, pop-out eyes when he sees us. Little Louie purses her lips and shakes her head. “But I heard his cough,” I insist.

  The footprints lead to a door in a high, latticework wall. The hinge squeaks when we step into the basement, which smells of rotting canvas and sawdust. Rows of overturned sailboats have been laid across wooden horses, and nearby, water trickles from a bust pipe. Then, somewhere in the gloom, a man coughs again. This time Little Louie hears it too. “Be careful,” she hisses. I’m too revved up to listen. The noise is coming from behind a plywood partition. I hobble over, my eyes adjusting to the dark, and peek in the door. Inside a narrow room, a man with wild black hair and a beard sits smoking on a cot. When he sees me, he glares as if I’m part of the world that wishes him harm. “Mary?” He jumps up, a muscle in his cheek twitching. “What in tarnation?”

  “Mary heard you coughing.” My aunt comes up from behind and puts her hands on my shoulders. Why isn’t she surprised? Or is Little Louie trying to stay calm for my sake? A small, wet smile spreads across his face. “By golly, you two are a sight for sore eyes.” He butts out his cigarette, his eyes burning with an emotion I don’t understand.

  “Are you going away? Please tell me! Where will you go?”

  “Hush, Mary,” Little Louie says. “Let me talk to John for a minute, will you?”

  He nods in the direction of the door. “We’ll just be a minute. Okay, Annabel Lee. You stand guard, eh?”

  “It’s my birthday tomorrow!”

  His smile widens. “Well now, many happy returns! Can you be a nice girl and keep watch for us?”

  Reluctantly, I do what he says. I don’t understand why he has to talk to her alone. I’m his special friend, I tell myself while I keep my eye on what’s going on outside the latticework door.

  THE ROAR OF AN ENGINE shreds the air. John and Little Louie hurry over. “Don’t tell on me, okay, Mary?” he whispers. “Specially not your little pal, eh?” I can feel myself tremble as I nod yes. “When will I see you again?” I whisper. He puts a finger to his lips and pushes me towards the door. “Get going now.” His hand falls away. When I turn to look, he’s disappeared into the shadows. I trudge outside with Little Louie. On the road, Sib’s snowmobile is speeding towards Towanda Lodge.

  “Saw Doc Bradford’s car.” Sib stops his machine and calls. “Thought I’d come by and check.”

  “We’ve had some trouble with the engine,” Little Louie yells back.

  “Want me to take a look at it?” Sib asks.

  “Would you?” Little Louie asks. A door bangs overhead, and Morley rushes outside. He must have heard the noise of the Ski-Doo from inside the lodge. “Sib, can you take us back on that thing?”

  I consider telling Morley about John, but everything happens too fast, and I promised to keep my mouth shut. Sib jumps off his machine and runs over.

  Little Louie climbs onto the front seat of the snowmobile. Morley and I get in its large caboose. My father grips my shoulders with both hands so I won’t fall out. After seeing John, my father’s presence confuses me.

  48

  SAL IS IN THE KITCHEN BAKING ME AN ANGEL FOOD CAKE. SHE stops when she sees me enter, covered in snow. Using a broom, she brushes it off my galoshes and helps me out of my soaking wet snowsuit. A snowball fight with the Bug House boys has ruined the home perm I got for my birthday. Sal gently tugs a bedraggled clump of my hair. “I guess those bad boys fixed your Toni. Shame on them, eh?” The warmth in her voice takes me by surprise. Before I can stop it, the urge to confess overpowers me. “I saw him yesterday, Sal.” Sal studies me. “Saw who, Lady Jane?”

  “He was hiding under Towanda Lodge.”

  “Is that so? You saw a man there?” She waits while I nod. “What did he look like then?”

  Should I tell Sal about John when I promised I wouldn’t? I’ve never told on him before, and it comes to me that my friendship with John has been full of secrets from the start. First, there were our pen pal letters, and after that, weeks of me learning to skate for him and finally, our visit with him in the hospital infirmary. And there’s something else. If I tell, I’ll get myself and Little Louie in trouble because she’s keeping his secret too. But it will be worse for him because he’ll be stuck behind bars for the rest of his life. He’ll never be released, not after defying Morley and Dr. Shulman. In that respect, he’s as good as dead.

  “I couldn’t see very well. But he was … around John’s age.”

  Sal’s eyes hold mine. “Did you get a real good look at his face?”

  I drop my eyes. “I think so.”

  “Well, then. Don’t go scaring me like that. Remember Petrolia, eh? You thought you saw him stealing your granny’s car. Plenty of drifters stay at the l
odge to help Old Man Beaudry with his chores. You must have seen one of them bums.”

  Suddenly, I’m too giddy for words. When she notices me smiling, Sal sucks her teeth. “For a minute there, you had me fooled.” Turning her back, she starts to work on my birthday cake again, whipping up the icing, using margarine instead of butter.

  WHEN MORLEY FINISHES HIS SECOND helping of my angel food cake, he gets up to leave. Outside, another snowstorm has blown in.

  “Are you going out on a night like this, Morley?” Little Louie points at the dining room window where white powder, like thick sprays of Sal’s icing sugar, sticks to the pane.

  “It’s Cap Lefroy. He won’t last the week.” Morley picks up his doctor’s bag, cuffing my cheek. “We had a nice birthday tonight, didn’t we Mary?”

  Morley waits while I compose myself. I feel a horrible weightless sensation, as if I’m circling earth in a capsule like Laika, the Russian dog who was shot into space with no hope of coming home. When my answer doesn’t come, Morley pulls on his coat and walks out. I watch him go over to the Oldsmobile, the snow coating his shoulders like fluffy dandruff. Per usual, he’s scraping off the windshield, inside and out. When he notices me at the window, he waves. I don’t wave back. After I can no longer see his car on Whitefish Road, my aunt says in a low, serious voice: “Alice used to find it hard too.”

  Puzzled, I fix my eyes on her face.

  “It broke your mother’s heart the way he put his patients first. Didn’t you know that?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s true. She died angry.” Before she can say any more, I hump myself out of the dining room, the angel cake thick as sand on my tongue. Little Louie rushes after me. “Listen. It’s not true what I said, Mary. Your mother didn’t die angry. She never complained. It was me who was mad. I thought your father should have paid more attention to her.”

  “Are you telling the truth?” I ask.

  “Of course, I’m telling you the truth. I wouldn’t lie to you.” When she says the word “lie,” her face changes. I don’t think anything of it. I throw myself against her chest, sobbing. And I am hers, as if she is my mother, and not my mother’s sister who chews gum and leaves her room in a mess.

  A Girl Talks about Goodness with Her Father

  The father, a large man over six-foot-five and his thirteen-year-old daughter are discussing Montaigne. Their conversation is not in his office, where he dispenses pills and cough medicines dressed in a white coat, but during an afternoon walk. It’s a habit with them, to hike in the countryside while they explore Montaigne’s ideas. The going is rough on the old lumber trail near the Bay, and the father takes his daughter’s hand to make sure she doesn’t stumble.

  “Montaigne thought to do good was the proper duty of a virtuous man,” the girl says. “How do you feel about this, father?”

  “When I come into the hospital in the morning and see the patients smiling in their beds, I know I have done my duty.”

  “When I try to be as good as you, I feel angry. As if too much is expected of me,” the girl answers.

  “If you do good every day, you will learn to ignore those thoughts. I have no resentment now. I just set a course and follow it.”

  They stop by his Oldsmobile and the father gets in. He motions for her to get in too. The girl hesitates. Then she starts running as fast as she can in the opposite direction. Suddenly, she stops. What has she done? She shouts for her father, but by now his car has turned into a speck on the country road.

  IT STRIKES ME NOW THAT the story I wrote after Little Louie put me to bed was based on a recurring dream. In the dream an old 1950s car is travelling down a country road. A large, menacing stranger wearing a fedora gets out and asks me to get in. I can’t see who it is because the man’s face is hidden under the brim of his hat but I know he is my father. All the same, if I get into the old car with him, I will end up dead. At first, I don’t understand the dream’s meaning. I think it’s warning me not to get into cars with older strangers. Years later, I understand: the dream isn’t about strangers. It’s about my will taking me over. It’s about the danger of falling into my father’s habits until I work myself to death like he did.

  49

  AROUND NOON THE NEXT DAY, AN ENVELOPE WITH FAMILIAR handwriting arrives. It’s postmarked with the stamp of a village near Towanda Lodge, but Little Louie’s name is on it instead of mine. Sal is preoccupied with boiling up tomato soup for lunch and she doesn’t see me grab the envelope and put it inside my satchel. I disappear upstairs to read it:

  Dearest Louisa:

  Don’t think yours truly has given up. If all goes as planned we’ll start a new life far away from this two-bit town.

  All my love, John

  P.S. The thought of you keeps me going. Thanks for giving me hope again.

  “All my love?” He signed my letters “affectionately,” meaning what you would think affectionately means (i.e., he has fond, affectionate and all-round serious feelings about me). He could have signed off with “best regards.” Did “affectionately” mean nothing? And how could Little Louie love him? Not long ago, she had Max and now she has John, too. Humiliating thoughts crash around inside my head: He wouldn’t love you, no matter how much somebody paid him. You are too scrawny and twisted-looking, even if you have become a bleeder. To steady myself, I try breathing slowly, and reread his postscript. It still says the same thing: “the thought of you keeps me going” and I get mad all over again. There’s not a word about me, his special friend. A big fat zero. His compliments were meaningless tossaway things. I was dumb enough to think he cared for me when all the time he was saving his real love for her. “Thirteen is the aching age,” Big Louie said. Well, I’m filled up with aching and somebody better make it go away. Yes. Why didn’t I think of it before? Something is owed me by John and Little Louie and I have to get that owed thing before I ache myself to death in Madoc’s Landing where the big empty spaces between the houses will make you go wild with loneliness.

  When I get myself calm again, I call down that I don’t want any lunch. Sal comes upstairs and stands outside my room, muttering as she dusts the hall furniture. The fake chirping of her voice suggests that she hopes I’ll stop sulking and come out and talk. I stay where I am. Later, when Sal is gone, I put John’s letter back in its envelope, glue its edges shut with LePage glue, and leave it on the hall table.

  THE NEXT MORNING, SAL HAS to wake me because I slept in. It’s Saturday and she reminds me that it’s Scooterama, when everybody in Madoc’s Landing comes out to see the scoots race each other up the Bay. The race is later this year because the Department of Lands and Forests wanted to enter its new fibreglass scoot built by the Department of Lands and Forests. The scoot wasn’t ready in time so town council postponed the race until the end of March. Thanks to our icebox winter, the ice is still thick enough to give the crowd a good show.

  Scooterama has never interested me before, but a front-page story about the new fibreglass scoot in The Chronicle starts me thinking. The scoot has a closed-in cabin, and a giant half-moonshaped rudder, and it outruns the older, wooden models, which are heavy and hard to steer. Most of the scoots on the Bay are hand-built and resemble wooden motorboats, except that an airplane engine and a propeller mounted on the stern drives them. The new fibreglass scoot works on the same principle only it’s bigger and sleeker.

  There’s a picture of it on the front page along with a newspaper diagram that shows the position of its steering wheel, foot-feed gas pedal, and the storage compartment under its bow, which has lots of bunk beds, the newspaper says. Its driver plans to take it north to the town of Kilarney to demonstrate how much farther and faster it can travel than other scoots.

  I go upstairs and pack some clothes into my school satchel. I stick in my Scholastic notebook and my grandmother’s history of southwestern Ontario, too, and leave my hockey cards behind. Then I write my goodbye note.

  Mouse’s Note to Morley

  Dear Morl
ey:

  I have decided to start a new life elsewhere because you don’t have time to love me and the one person I thought cared about me loves somebody else. I know you may be sad after I go but you won’t stay sad for long since Sal is there to cook for you even though she leaves lumps in her mashed potatoes. I am giving you back my Lone Ranger cowboy hat so you will have something to remember me by. I know I ought to have been easier to look after (i.e., not get sick with polio) when you have so many patients to cure although I don’t think healing people makes you better than anybody else. I think you look after the sick because you like to do it and I’m sorry to have to tell you this but your selfishness has pressed like a big pile of granite rocks across my heart. Now that I’m striking out on my own, the pile of granite has lifted off my chest and I don’t have to worry anymore about being second best. Maybe you don’t want me to feel like second best. And maybe you never did but that’s how I felt. Anyhow, I’m changing my name to M.B. Bradford. Don’t try to look for me. I won’t be back this way again.

  Love, your daughter M.B.

  I put my note on Morley’s dresser and go downstairs for breakfast. My father is still in the kitchen working on the soft-boiled eggs that Sal cooked for him. I stare sadly at the back of his head. You will never see him again, I tell myself. You will never see the thick iron-grey hair that matches his fedora, or his sad, deep-set healer’s eyes, or feel the rough love tap of his hand against your cheek when he says hello. You will never sit by his chair and keep people from disturbing him when he naps after supper, or write things for him that he doesn’t read. And he has no way of knowing that you are going out of his life forever, and Sal doesn’t either although she’ll be glad to have Morley to herself.