Joe
I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT GIVING UP THE MEDICATIONS. They aren’t going to
save me anyway, and they make my thoughts cloudy, my memories more difficult to retrieve. They keep the pain at bay, that’s true, but I’m still confined to this bed. Nothing destroys a man’s pride more than having his sister help him with his bed pan, or his brother bathe his disease-ridden body. I won’t let Leah help. A daughter should not see her father this way. I’m only holding on to this life to make up for lost time. If Leah wasn’t here, maybe I’d wander off into the woods like cats do, to die alone, to give the family distance from the deed.
I’m going to miss her when I’m gone. Seems like a foolish thing to say since I’ll be the one who’s dead, but I will. I don’t know if she’ll miss me— she barely knows me. She only knows that I beat her mom and left before she was born. That’s a terrible legacy to leave a daughter. It seems unfair that time is almost up for me just when I’m finding true happiness again, but time is never a friend to the sick or the old.
Frankie, in a rare moment of lucidity, told me decades ago that I needed to enjoy my youth, because once you become a man, time speeds up. He claimed he went to bed one night a spry eighteen-year-old and woke up as a forty-eight-year-old drunk. Now I consider his words gospel. I stayed west of the Rockies for far too long. I worked, hiked, moved, sent money home when I could. I thought I was content, but I don’t know if I even understand what that means.
I WAS HIKING back from a week-long camping trip in the mountains. I had made my way down the narrow, rutted trail until it met up with a tidy line of packed earth that belonged to a national park. The sun was starting to sink
when I looked at my watch and realized that the park would be closing soon and the trails would be empty. I hurried my pace and was about ten minutes from the trailhead, where I’d parked my old truck. Then I saw something, a tiny plastic hand sticking out of the brush. As I bent down to pick it up, my foot slid on some dewy moss and I caught my ankle in a small trench just off the trail. My backpack slid off to the side, unbalancing me. The pointed needles scratched my face as my head just missed the trunk of a Douglas fir. The pain in my ankle was immediate. I struggled to get the backpack off and roll onto my back, the small plastic doll clutched in my hand.
My ankle throbbing, I pulled myself up and sat against the tree that I had just missed moments before. The trail was only feet away, but the dark was settling in. The thick summer foliage only helped to darken the forest floor. The ankle wasn’t broken, thanks to the tall hiking boots tied tight, but I knew better than to take the boot off. The swelling would stay down so long as the boot stayed on. I looked at the doll in my hands.
“No offence, but I don’t think you are worth this much trouble.” I sat it down beside the backpack and took out my canteen, which I’d filled before starting back down the mountain. If I ended up there for the night, I’d be fine. I still had water and a few chocolate bars. It was chilly when the sun went down, but I had my sleeping bag. When I’d been there for over an hour and had to light my kerosene lantern to see the trail, I knew I was staying one more night in the woods.
I sipped my water with a bit of whiskey and watched the stars appear through an opening in the branches, just enough space to watch the stars float across the sky.
“Reminds me of Maine.” My ankle was propped up on a stone and the doll was still lying on the ground beside my backpack. I set her against my knees, facing me. She had blue eyes far too big to be realistic. Her brown hair was woven into two braids, and the lips were painted light pink. She wore a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, doll-sized.
“The stars, they remind me of Maine,” I repeated. “Jesus, Joe, you’re talking to a doll.” I shook my head and put her facedown on the ground beside me again, but it didn’t last long. Another sip of drink and I put her back against my knees.
“Someone is probably missing you.” I picked off a piece of dried moss from one of her braids. “I have a girl, you know. She might like a doll like you. Not that I know what she’d like. I don’t even know what she looks
like, let alone what toys she likes. She might be out of the doll phase by now. Maybe, I guess. I don’t know when girls stop playing with dolls.”
In the light cast by my little lantern, the doll appeared annoyed. Maybe she was judging me, this silly doll who had no business being out in the woods. Somewhere off in the distance, an animal howled, and I remembered a moon, a bright moon with a blue halo.
“I don’t know if Leah likes dolls or if she ever did, but my sister Ruthie had one she loved. She used to travel with it tucked under her arm. My mother made it with old socks and a few buttons. I don’t think Ruthie would like you as much. You’re all plastic and hard. Her doll was soft and easy to love.”
I fell asleep holding that doll on my lap, the kerosene lantern empty and dark, the throbbing in my ankle starting to dull as the stars crossed over us above.
I had just started to wake when I heard the voices of early morning hikers. I called out and they found me easily. One of them drove me to the emergency room while the other gathered my things and followed in my truck. Torn ligaments. A tight wrap and some painkillers and I was on my way again, grateful that it was my left leg and I could still drive. The two men who’d brought me to the hospital had waited for me. I thanked them and offered to buy breakfast, but they declined, telling me they were just happy I was okay. They gave me my keys and disappeared out the hospital doors.
I sat in the cab of the truck and tried to get my thoughts together. The painkillers were making me a little woozy and nostalgic for a life I never had. I missed Leah, a girl I’d fathered but never met. I missed Ruthie, a sister I’d lost and never found. I cursed the doll sitting on the seat beside me.
I headed out of town, back to the national park, and dropped the doll off at the lost and found before starting out again. When I got to the turnoff where the rural road met the highway and I should have gone west, I didn’t. I turned toward the child I had abandoned, back to the parents I had left to grieve not two but three missing children.
I was going east. I was going home. I could be a father to Leah, a son to my parents, maybe even a friend to Cora. I expected nothing from her, no sympathy, no love. I’d done the unforgivable to her. I’d drawn blood and left her alone to raise a child I had helped create. The longer I drove, as flat
land gave way to rocky and trees started to populate the landscape, the more I thought about how much of a disappointment I had been. As I circled around cities, the more I thought about my mistakes, the less comfortable I was with my decision to turn east. I made it to New Brunswick before fear replaced the confidence I’d had when I left that doll in a box in the Rockies. At the border crossing at Madawaska, I turned and headed into Maine.
If it was possible, Route 9 looked worse than it did when I was a boy. The potholes were bigger, the houses even more decrepit, but the fields looked the same, and those alders grew out of the ditch as they always had. I felt a little annoyed that the place just kept on going. The sun was high when I pulled over and got out of the truck. The cicadas were chirping away, as if I couldn’t tell on my own that the sun was blisteringly hot. I sat down on that rock and closed my eyes. Behind my eyelids, I watched my six-year-old self throw bread to the crows and stuff the bologna in my mouth, waving to Ruthie as I wandered away. I can’t be sure how long I sat like that, but the sweat was starting to soak through my shirt.
“Hey, you okay, man?”
I nearly jumped out of my skin. “Yeah, I’m fine. You scared the shit outta me, though.” I used the back of my hand to wipe the sweat off my forehead.
“Sorry. You were all bent over—I thought maybe you were having a heart attack.”
“No, nothing like that. Just remembering, that’s all. And I got a bit of a banged-up ankle. Nothing so serious.” I stood up and extended my hand.
“Well, sure looked like a heart attack from this angle.” He had a strong handshake.
“You work around here?”
“Yup, my granddad owned these fields, then my dad, but they’re both gone now. Heart attacks.” He pointed at me. “So, you can see why I was a bit concerned.”
“Your name Ellis?” I asked.
“It sure is. We know one another?”
“No. I knew your father, I suppose. I worked these fields when I was just young.”
I turned my head to look down to where the cabin should have been, but the bushes had grown up around it and the road was nothing more than two ruts in the dirt, almost gone to time and overgrowth.
“So, where’d the cabin go? Where’s the pickers?”
“The pickers live in the bunkhouse down the road. Not sure what you mean about the cabin. Unless you’re talking about the pile of wood and stone at the end of this road.” He walked closer and put his hand on my shoulder. “You sure you’re okay? You look pale and red-faced all at the same time.”
“Just the heat.” I sat back down on the rock. “You sure I can’t do anything for you?”
“You could give me a job.” I don’t know why I said it. I don’t know why I would want it. There was so much misery associated with those fields.
“What about that ankle?”
“Won’t slow me down. I give you my word.”
“I do have some work raking berries, cutting lines. Just had one of the Mexicans quit to go back for his mother’s funeral. Can’t say how long I’ll need ya, but if you’re up for it.”
“Sure am.”
He motioned for me to follow, and I got up from the rock and into my truck. The bunkhouse was a long, narrow building with bunks that lined one side and closets on the other. The distance between the end of the bunks and the closets was just enough to let a man pass through. The blankets were all the same dull grey. The occasional bed held a handmade quilt that someone probably brought from home to keep them from getting heartsick.
“There are four toilets and four showers.” Ellis pointed to two doors at the end of the bunkhouse. “You gotta share them with twenty-four other men. It’s best if you’re an early riser, if you want hot water.”
It smelled of working men and earth. He showed me to a bunk just outside the bathroom door. I laid my backpack on the bed, all my worldly possessions tucked away in the dark of the canvas bag.
“You start tomorrow. Breakfast is at sun-up.” He turned and left me alone. I laid my back, tired of driving, down on that mattress, crossed my feet, put my hands on my chest and fell into sleep.
That night, under the roof of the dining tent, an older man waved me over. It took me a minute to recognize him, but he knew me right away. Juan, the same man who had taken over our fields when we left all those years ago, was still there. He was a foreman now and the only person to remember me. I sat and he watched me eat. It was unnerving, and just as I
was about to say something, he whispered, “I remember your brother.” That was the first and last time he mentioned it, and I was grateful for his understanding.
The next morning, the newest Ellis, as if testing me, put me in a row all on my own. I picked those berries with a fierce intensity, determined to prove that I was every bit the picker these new folks were. Beside me, a man named Diego from a small town in southern Mexico lagged behind a few feet. At lunch, we sat at the edge of a row with a ham sandwich with mustard, a bottle of water and an apple courtesy of the company. In his fractured English, he told me that this field was for the Mexicans, and if I wanted, there were a few fields down the road that were still worked by the Indians.
“Nah, I’m good here. I don’t like to see people I might know.” “You’re a strange man.”
I nodded.
“I love to see my friends.” He shook his head, threw his apple core into the trees and went back to work.
Saturdays were half days, just like they’d been when I was a boy. Since it was early and I had nothing else to do, I went to see what had become of the cabin, that place that held some of my greatest memories. And most of my saddest. The road that was once well used, the one where my father knocked out the tail light of a police car, the one where Mae held Mom and walked her back to the campfire, was overgrown now. New roads, new machines and new workers had taken their place. The dark faces of the Mi’kmaq were replaced by the dark faces of men from southern countries, men who spoke lyrical languages, who sent money home for their families, who stayed to themselves, who worked hard and laughed even harder.
Behind a collection of alders growing wild and abundant sat the cabin. Or at least what was left of it. The two small windows that framed the door were broken, the glass scattered on the floor inside. The right side of the roof had been eaten away—raccoons, I assumed, or maybe rats. The door was hanging on by a single rusted hinge. Inside, the dust had settled thick and grey, and the prints of animals and insects weaved in and around like an odd but beautiful labyrinth. Only the steel springs remained of a mattress leaning against the back wall. The wood stove was about the only thing that looked like it had survived the ravages of time and neglect.
I kicked away the skeleton of a mouse and went to sit on the outside steps, soft with rot. Growth obscured the view of the campfire, and the firepit had been eaten by time and nature. Somewhere in the recesses of my mind, the voice of my mother came through, so clear that it scared me up off my ass.
“Get those weeds outta there. Clean this place up. We gotta live here for the next couple a months. Let’s make it nice.”
When I want to remember the sound of my mother’s voice, I can’t recall it, but when she wants to be heard, she lets me know. I lifted myself carefully off the rotten steps and started pulling weeds, clearing a little space around the steps. I stood back, admiring the work, the clean patch of earth. A trip to the hardware store was next. I picked up a broom, enough wood to repair the steps, some nails, a hammer, a measuring tape and a handsaw. I loaded the cab of the truck with cleaning supplies, and my wallet was as close to empty as it had been in years.
By the time my belly was good and hungry, the place was clean. The cobwebs, the dust and the bones of mice were gone. I covered the windows with bits of an old tarp I had in the back of the truck and nailed the rest over the hole in the roof. It would do until I could get more wood and some shingles. By the time I joined the others for dinner, I was covered in dust and as hungry as I’d ever been.
For the next few evenings, I stayed out at the cabin, tinkering, repairing, wandering in the woods, which were familiar but different. I returned when most of the men were already asleep.
“Come, sit, have tea.” It was a Saturday night and Juan was sitting on the floor with three other men. The bottom bunk acted as a table between them, cards spread out in the middle, and a man snored on the top bunk.
“I’m okay. Going to go to bed,” I said quietly.
“Come, play.” The same way he waved me to eat with him, he waved me to sit with them, to take time to be with other people, to get lost in a game of cards.
I stayed awake until the early hours, until my body protested my seat on the floor and forced me to bed. They were a good bunch of guys, but I wanted to be alone. Alone was where I found my peace, and after years of living in camps, I was determined. A week later, those same men who’d welcomed me into their little community watched and nodded as I took the mattress off my bunk and carried it down the long corridor of beds. I drove
it to the cabin and placed it on the side where the roof still held. I fell into a deep sleep, a quiet, dreamless sleep. When the sun dawned the next morning, I was already up, sitting on the steps, catching the light as it filtered through the trees and fell on the ground, setting the day ablaze.
“Mister.”
I was standing in line at the food tent, talking with Juan, when Ellis pulled me aside.
“I saw that you took a mattress from the bunkhouse and haven’t been sleeping there. I don’t want trouble. I need to make sure nothing fishy is going on in my fields.”
“Nothing fishy, I swear it. I just took it to that cabin down the old overgrown road. The one with the big rock at the end.”
“That cabin ain’t safe for living in. I’m gonna have to ask you to bring that mattress back, and if you don’t want to sleep in the bunks, you might not have work here. It’s an insurance thing, you understand.”
“Well, how about I use my own money to fix it up and I’ll sign a waiver or something.”
The other men waiting in line watched to see if I was about to be fired. “I guess that’s fine. Just know that I won’t be paying you for making
any repairs. I’m happy to let the place crumble where it’s at, let nature take care of it. And it ain’t yours either. You know that? It belongs to this company, my company, whether it’s falling down or fixed up.”
“That’s fine with me.”
The supply store along Route 9 was almost unchanged since the time the people behind the counter called me sour. It was still a catch-all store with groceries, tools and hardware, a service station and a diner. My presence among the tourists stopping for the bathroom and snacks, the locals and the migrant workers went unnoticed. When I was younger, my brown face would have meant eyes on me the entire time. Now, most of the faces were brown and no one seemed to care. Around back, a bar sold bottles of beer and shots of hard liquor. That was new. Juan told me to avoid it. Only the lowest class of folks spent time there.
I bought a pot and stocked up on cans of soup, bread and butter. Enough to get me through to my next paycheque.
“You got any whiskey here?” Something to take the edge off the stiff joints and help me sleep.
“Sorry, we don’t carry whiskey.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure. We got beer on the shelves over there, and shots of hard stuff at the bar around back. That’s it.” He was a fat boy with the yellowest hair I’d ever seen. He was sweating through his shirt. He rang me up and handed me my receipt. I went to put it in the bag with the groceries.
“Take a look at that receipt and make sure I got everything right.” “I’m sure you did.” I turned to leave.
“You better make sure, just in case.”
I took the receipt out of the bag and looked at the items, all of them accounted for in the bag. I turned it over and saw a note in barely legible handwriting: “Out back, blue truck. Tell him Roger said it’s okay.” I nodded at the yellow-haired boy, put my supplies in the cab of my truck and wandered around back. There, in a blue truck, sat a boy with the same yellow hair but a few years older, an unlit cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth. He was sound asleep, his head against the headrest. I tapped on the window, and he jumped about as high as a man can jump inside the cab of a truck. I let out a little chuckle.
“Roger said to see you about something to drink.”
He wiped the drool from the corner of his mouth, the cigarette still dangling. He reached around behind the seat, brought out some homemade whiskey and handed it to me. I gave him some cash, he looked at it, nodded, shoved it into his back pocket and laid his head back down on the headrest. The whole transaction took place without another word. I shook my head and walked away.
That night, I had tomato soup with bread and butter and a sip of whiskey, just enough to dull the leftover aches of the accident and the new aches from the field work. I cooked over an open fire in front of the little cabin, where a different fire had burned decades ago. When the sun was low and peeking through the trees, I grabbed the grey, scratchy blanket from the mattress and lay next to the fire. I lay there until the moon moved across the sky and out of sight. I woke sometime in the night to a dead fire and the smooth curve of the Milky Way.
I adjusted well to picking berries again, but as soon as my body decided it was still young enough for the work, the work was over for the season. I helped haul potatoes at the nearby farms and even helped Ellis burn the far fields. I was seven weeks in Maine when I decided I might as well stay. Ellis had no work but told me I could stay in the cabin so long as I didn’t
make any trouble. I’m not sure what trouble he thought I was going to get into out there all by myself, but I promised nonetheless. I got hired at a dairy farm fifteen minutes away and helped with the milking and the repairs that plague a farm. I had to be on the road before the birds even bothered to start their morning songs. I was home by three and had time to work on the cabin before the sun set. The farm owner let me take scraps of wood and extra nails, and he even gave me a bag of shingles for half price. It saved him from driving back into Bangor to return them. I patched the roof and got myself two small windows, used ones from a yard sale. By Christmas, I had a table and two chairs, a rocking chair to sit by the fire and a steel tub for water. In the summer, it would collect rainwater, but in winter, I put snow in it in the evening and let it melt. By morning, I had enough water to wash my dishes and my body. On weekends, I washed my clothes. The only thing I didn’t like was the outhouse in February. It was a cold walk through high snow, so most of the time, I stood in the doorway and pissed off the front steps. No one to see me but the trees.
In the faint light of winter dusk, it’s easy to see where age has gotten to you. The skin around my elbows and knees seemed looser somehow, my feet more crooked than they’d been the last time I’d taken a good look at them. In the small mirror I’d bought for shaving, I noticed the wrinkles around my eyes—laugh lines, I’d heard them called, although I don’t think I laughed enough to earn them. They crinkled and stretched out from the corners of my eyes and nearly met my hairline. But I still had a head of thick black hair, the only place age seemed to have left me alone.
That’s how I spent the first year in Maine, the first of many. Slowly, the cabin became a home. Once a week, I gathered the supplies I needed and a bottle of that godawful whiskey. I started mixing it with water, which made the burn more tolerable.
“WELL, FUCK ME, if it isn’t Joe.”
Someone behind me in line at the supply shop tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to see a wizened version of a man I once knew.
“Frankie? You old bastard. How are you still alive?”
He laughed through the two teeth in his mouth, and I could smell the rot in the air between us. “I dunno, Joe, but I am. The Lord must keep me around to amuse himself.” He stepped forward and threw his arms around my midsection in an awkward hug. “And look at you, all old and shit.”
“This coming from a man with no teeth and who, by my estimation, has shrunk about a foot and a half.”
“It’s my back from all those years in the berry fields. I’m all crumpled up.”
There were so many things that neither of us knew how to say. There could have been apologies, there could have been jokes, and there could have been anger. With so much resting on that silence and the unknowns of what would happen if we broke it, I turned back toward the counter and paid for my groceries. I was leaving when I heard the teller.
“Sorry, Frankie, you ain’t got enough for smokes. Either that sandwich or the smokes.” Frankie stood there looking pathetic, a pile of change in his weathered hand.
“Just get out of the line, you old drunk.” A man about my age was waiting behind him, milk and a packet of beef jerky in his hands.
Frankie turned to look at him.
The man leaned in closer as if Frankie couldn’t hear him. “Get. Out. Of.
The. Line. Idiot probably don’t speak English.”
I watched Frankie’s thin fingers form a fist, not one that would do any damage, but one that would no doubt end in Frankie bleeding.
“I got it.” I handed the teller the money and left before Frankie could make a show of it.
“Wait there, Joe, wait a minute. At least let me thank you.” “No worries, Frankie.”
“Now let me buy you a drink, Joe. Just let me do that.”
“And how are you gonna buy me a drink if you can’t even buy yourself a sandwich?”
“I got a tab. Just paid it off. That’s how come I got no money for the sandwich, but I got a tab at the bar. Come on now, Joe, for old times’ sake.” “We never drank together, Frankie. The last time I saw you drunk, I lost
my brother.”
Frankie whistled out of the corner of his mouth, a weak whistle, mostly spit and air. “That hurt, Joe. You know I’m sorry for that. You know it.”
“Fine, Frankie. Let’s get a drink.”
I’d never been to the bar. I preferred the quiet of the cabin, the warmth from the wood stove, the books I’d been getting from the supply store, ones left at the nearby hotel and dropped off by people thinking they were being charitable to the migrant workers, helping them with their English.
The bar was about as nasty as you’d think a bar behind an old supply store in the middle of nowhere would be. The ceilings were low and the floor was sticky. It smelled of stale beer, cigarette smoke and the sweat of men with no women. The smoke was so thick my eyes began to water the moment we stepped inside.
The bar itself was made of old two-by-fours, unsanded. I was careful not to run my hand along the edge, in case of a splinter. The stools were mismatched, old, torn vinyl wrapped over steel. The whole place screamed defeat. The radio played country classics on repeat. Frankie and I took a place at the bar. He hopped up on the only remaining stool, leaving me to stand beside him. He ordered us each a beer and put it on his tab.
“Been ten minutes since you paid the last one, Frankie. Sure you want to start so soon?”
“Sure do. It’s a special occasion. This here is Joe. He used to pick these fields with me back when we was younger.”
“You were young, Frankie? I figured you came out of your mother looking like that.” Everyone at the bar laughed.
Frankie smiled and snapped his fingers. “You’re a funny fella. Now just get my friend and me a drink.”
The beer tasted hopeless and flat. I didn’t drink much anymore and almost never in public. I preferred my whiskey solo. On the rare occasion when I drank too much, I hurt only myself. It didn’t take Frankie long to down his first drink. I wasn’t even halfway through the first when he was looking at the bottom of his second glass.
“Jesus, Frankie, slow down.”
“No need, my friend, I’m pickled, eh. Don’t have no effect on me at all anymore.” He was already slurring. “I’m so sorry about Charlie, you know I am, don’t ya, Joe? You know I’m sorry.”
“It was a long time ago, Frankie.” I took a drink of my beer, still my first and getting warm.
The bar had no windows except for a narrow one along the back wall. It was covered in cooking grease so thick that the sun couldn’t even push its light through. When the door opened, the sunlight was blinding.
Frankie rambled on about me coming to work in the Indian fields instead of the Mexican ones. The door opened, and a black silhouette of a big man entered. He ducked low to avoid hitting his head on the top jamb, and his bulk took up the entire doorway. I was raising my hand to order one
more beer before I headed back to the cabin, looking forward to being alone again, when he walked by. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I looked at him, those beefy cheeks and fat lips, his hair still long and stringy, just like it had been all those years ago when his features had been hidden in the shadows of a carnival tent. Archie’s younger brother, the one who’d held my brother while Archie beat the life out of him, stepped by me on his way to the bathroom.
That rage that I had run from, that emotion I thought I had tamed, reared its head one last time. I felt my mouth go dry and my palms go damp. I felt a heat so intense I was afraid I would catch fire and burn us all down. I looked at Frankie and saw fear cross his face. He reached for me and missed. I’ve heard of blind rage, of being so angry that your memory hides your actions from you. But I wanted to remember this. I wanted to see his face before I smashed my hand into it. I wanted to lie in bed at night and know that I had caused him pain. I wrestle with this now that I’m dying, thinking I should maybe atone for my sins in case there is a God, but I can’t. I don’t want to. I’m not saying I’m proud of what I did, but I don’t feel shame in it either. The bastard is still walking this earth while I’m about to leave it, and I never killed anyone.
He didn’t notice me, not that he would. He probably hadn’t thought of me in years if at all, but I would have known him anywhere. He reached the men’s room door, but before he could grasp the handle, I tapped him on the shoulder. When he turned, I punched him. There were decades of anger behind that punch, and it landed hard. My arm, strong from years of manual labour, crushed his nose, and for an instant, Cora’s face flashed before me. He stood there, hand to his nose, blood leaking from between his fingers, shock in his eyes. I looked down at my hand, a hand that had not been raised in anger in years, and then I punched him again. I heard teeth clatter against the floor and blood ran from his lips. He didn’t have time to react before I placed my hands on his shoulders, pulled him toward me and drove my knee between his legs. He groaned and dropped to the ground.
“That’s for killing my brother, asshole.” I kicked him one last time in the stomach before I felt Frankie’s fingers wrap themselves around my arm and pull me toward the exit. The other men, drinks in hand, didn’t move, didn’t defend him and didn’t help him. He lay there cursing me in between groans. I let Frankie lead me through the door and into the sunlight.
“You need to get your ass out of here before he gets off that floor.”
Frankie was right. I got in my truck, made sure no one was watching and took off, leaving Frankie in a cloud of dust. I drove all day, down along the coast, waiting until dark to head back to my cabin. When I finally turned off Route 9, I kept my headlights off. I was relieved when I stopped the truck and found myself alone.
I heard later that when he finally got up off the floor and started breathing again, he went into a rage, looking for me, asking who I was, where he could find me. Not one person in that bar told him a thing. He walked out of there bloody and angry, not knowing it was me who beat on him. In some ways, I was happy he didn’t know. In others, I wanted him to know that Charlie’s death wasn’t forgotten, that I knew what he’d done, and that while he got up, unlike my beautiful brother, I got the last word.
I could have walked away that time, but I didn’t. I ran the first time and fought the second. It should have been the other way around, but we can’t change the past. That was the last fight I ever fought with my fists, and the last time I ever saw Frankie. Years later, Mae told me that he’d come back home just after that fight. Maybe he was scared that Archie’s brother would look for revenge on him for being with me. Apparently, one day not long after returning home, he sat down to a big bowl of beef stew at his sister’s table up on the rez and died. Just like that. No fuss, no commotion. Just died. I envy Frankie that ending, that grace.
It seemed remarkable to me that in all my years in Maine, Frankie was the only one from the camps I ever ran into. And what was even more remarkable was he didn’t tell anyone I was there. At least that’s what I thought.
I never stepped foot in that bar after that day. It didn’t hold anything for me. I didn’t crave friendship or conversation the way some people do. Funny to think about it now, since all I do is talk whenever there is someone around to talk to. I have a desire that most dying people must have, the desire to get every last bit out, every last thank you, every last I’m sorry.
I was in Maine nearly ten years when I came home one evening in midsummer to find a note on my door informing me that my father had died. I could only assume Frankie had told them where I was. I could’ve gone home, but I didn’t. It didn’t mean that I didn’t grieve him—I did. But I didn’t go home. I sent money, and I hoped it would help with the grieving, although I’ve found that money rarely helps with the things that are the most important.
Money sent and my guilt fresh on the surface, I took a few days off work and returned to the grasslands. I parked alongside the ditch, the dust of a dry summer dirt road billowing behind me, and I admired the little house. With each pilgrimage north of the border, I marvelled at her wildflowers that brought colour to the yellows and browns of the landscape. Black-eyed Susans, lupines, alpine buttercups and wild roses, the same ones that grew along the roads back home.
This time, I was surprised when the front door opened and she stepped out, shielding her eyes from the sun with one hand, the other hand resting on her hip. I waved a small, shy wave, but she didn’t wave back. I realized then that I might look quite sinister, a strange man pulled over in a beat-up truck, staring at the house of a woman who lived so far from everyone else. I opened the door and stepped out. She stayed where she was.
“I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t mean to be all creepy. You were kind to me once, and I remember that kindness. I don’t mean any harm.”
“Come closer, then. Closer but not too close.” She stood like a statue, moving only her lips.
I looked both ways on a road where I’d never seen another vehicle and stepped across. I stopped at the end of the driveway.
“A little closer.”
I took a few steps and stopped.
“A little closer.” She took her hand down from her brow and placed it on her other hip. It was the same way Mae did it when she was about to lay into you for doing something she considered stupid. The woman was quiet, and I felt the warmth of embarrassment on my cheeks. I was about to turn around and head back to the truck, put it in drive and get out of there, when she said, “You go around back. There’s a little table. I’ll bring out some water.”
I rounded the corner of the house, weaving my way through knee-high grass and flowers. Out back, she had vegetable gardens green and lush. The entire place seemed like a mirage. A small table made of iron sat just outside a set of sliding doors. Two chairs sat across from each other, waiting for people to sit, to converse. It was one of the most welcoming places I’ve ever been.
The door slid open, and she walked out carrying a jug of water and two glasses. She didn’t say anything, just poured us each a glass and sat down. We both took a drink. I was nervous, in the way a thirteen-year-old boy is
nervous when a pretty girl looks at him. I suddenly felt nothing like the mystery man of the Maine woods, who worked his bones to dust and stayed to himself. I felt like a boy, small and waiting.
“I remember you.” She sat back, her glass still in her hand. “You do?”
“It’s not very often I get strangers out here. Most everyone comes out here is on their way somewhere from somewhere. You were nowhere. And now you’re here again.”
I took a deep breath and started to cough. My eyes watered and she handed me a napkin as she inspected me. When I stopped, short of breath and a little red-faced, she asked me, “You’re not expecting anything from me, are ya?” Her eyebrows arched.
“I’m a married man.” “I don’t see a ring.”
“Doesn’t make it any less true.”
“Good. A lot of men expect things of me and I’m tired of it.”
We stayed out there, listening to the wind whistle through the grass, watching birds flit in and out. The occasional scent of the wild roses passed on the wind.
“The wild roses remind me of home,” I said. “Where is home for you?”
“Nova Scotia.”
“Long way from here.” “Yup.”
“You headed there now or the other direction?” “Neither. I headed up here to see you.”
It was her turn to stay quiet, to consider the strange man sitting across from her, who had appeared not once but twice out of nowhere to take up her time. She was quiet for so long I thought about getting up and leaving.
“So, what’s at home that’s got you scared to be there?” “I’m not scared.”
“You know, when you say you’re not scared instead of answering the question, I can tell you’re scared.”
“My family.”
“They do something bad to you?”
“You don’t remember the conversation we had alongside the road that day, just before the skies opened?”
“I think I made more of an impression on you than you made on me. I don’t mean to sound cruel. I remember your face, that long, sad face. Ain’t that enough?”
“I suppose. They didn’t do nothing to me. It’s what I did to them.”
She invited me to stay for supper, chicken stew with gravy and bannock cooked in a frying pan, smothered in butter. The inside of the house was small but bright, lived in and happy. So unlike my cabin back in Maine with its weathered, grey walls and not a picture or a decoration to be found. If I wasn’t going to use something to hunt, cook or clean with, it wasn’t welcome. As I stood at the door, I began to think that my disposition might be a bit sunnier if I decorated like she did. She’d painted every inch of wall with flowers and trees, insects and animals. With the blue sky reflected on the walls of her house, the outside had come in.
“You do this?” “Sure did.”
“You an artist?”
“Thought about it a few times, but it never comes to nothing.” She pointed to the kitchen table, a small, round wooden thing with a pot of flowers in the middle. I sat while she took the stew out of the oven and ladled it into a bowl. When she set it in front of me, I nearly cried. It smelled so warm and savoury. So many memories were wrapped up in the scent of stew. I waited until she was seated.
“Don’t stand on ceremony here. Eat up before it gets cold.”
It was every bit as delicious as it smelled. In that moment, sitting in the kitchen of a stranger thousands of kilometres from home, I was thrown back to the night of my accident, to the carrots on my plate before I stormed out and changed my own history, before I walked in front of that truck and ended up with a life full of aches and pains. The first time I let the anger win.
We ate in quiet while the sun began to set, throwing light onto the yellow grass and making the world outside the window glow gold. Some of that light came to rest on the floor at my feet, and I marvelled at it while she cleared the dishes from the table. I didn’t ask, but she made a pot of tea and set it in front of me.
“So, why me? What did I do, what did I say, to make you sentimental enough to drive all the way here just to look at my house?”
I didn’t think I had the answer until it started to come out of my mouth.
“You told me that we aren’t sour. We make mistakes, but we aren’t any better or any worse than anyone else.”
“Well, wasn’t I smart.” She smiled over the lip of her teacup as she softly blew on the tea.
“I was in a bad place then. Your words made sure I didn’t get to a terrible place. I guess I just wanted to thank you.”
“Well, you’re welcome, I guess. And just so you know, I still believe that.”
I helped her wash the dishes and brought some wood in from the pile outdoors for the morning, when she needed to make her coffee and do her laundry. She still had an outhouse and washed her clothes by hand, hanging them to dry, even in the dead of winter. She told me it had worked since people were put on earth, so she guessed it worked for her. When I was standing at the door, readying to leave, to go somewhere—I wasn’t really sure where—she reached up and stroked my face. Her hand was soft and warm, and I leaned into it. She stood on her toes and kissed my other cheek.
“Well, I’d best be going. Thank you for supper.”
“Take care. Drive safe and get that cough checked out. And stop thinking that you’re the cause of other people’s misery. The only misery you’re causing is your own.”
I turned and nodded. When I got back into the truck and turned it back onto the road, I saw her wave and close the door behind her.
I drove right through to Maine, stopping only to gas up and use the restroom. When I got home, sometime in the middle of the night, I looked at those grey walls, so bare and sad looking. I closed my eyes and saw her house again, so full of colour and joy, and I started to paint. The next evening, under the dull light of a kerosene lamp, I painted ocean waves and apple trees, a small substitute for a place called home.
That summer, after my road trip, I collected seeds and stored them away. The next summer, I grew a garden and it flourished. I don’t know how, because I’d never tried growing anything before. But when fall came, I had enough vegetables to last half the winter but no way to keep them. The supply store didn’t have jars for canning, so I had to travel into Bangor, and I decided to make a trip of it. I washed my clothes and took myself to the casino hotel. I had a steak dinner and a real shot of whiskey, lost fifty bucks to the machines, watched a woman twice my age sing cover tunes in a dress that was far too small, and slept in a comfortable bed. I was leaving
the next morning, checking out, when I heard my name. I don’t think I’d heard my own name from someone who wasn’t telling me what to do in a very long time. And I knew the voice, knew it as well as my own even if it had been years since I’d last heard it. I slowly turned around and saw my brother staring at me.
“Morning, Ben.”
“Good morning, Ben? Really?”
“You’re not gonna make a big scene, are you? I just want to check out.
How about I meet you in the parking lot?”
I paid, left and stood leaning against my truck, my heart racing. When he finally walked out the doors, I stood up straight, just in time for him to punch me in the chin.
“Jesus, Ben.” I rubbed my chin. I could feel the swelling already.
“Don’t act like you didn’t deserve that.” He leaned against the truck alongside me, and I moved a couple inches away.
“Mae and I know you’ve been in Maine. Frankie came to pick apples a couple times before he died. We didn’t tell Mom and Dad. I sent word when Dad died, and you didn’t come. How many times you gonna break Mom’s heart, Joe?”
I was confused. I always thought that if they knew where I was, they’d come and get me, that they’d want me to come home. Maybe not Cora, but the rest. Confusion turned to hurt, and hurt was trying to turn to anger, but I wasn’t going to let it.
“Why didn’t you come get me, if you knew I was here?” “You seemed like you wanted to stay lost. Am I wrong?” “No.”
“Time to grow up, Joe. Come home, take responsibility, be a man.” “How’s Leah?” I asked.
“She’s an amazing woman. Cora did good raising her.” “I sent money.”
“Money isn’t a father, Joe.”
Ben stood up, pushing himself off the truck, and for the first time, I noticed how old he’d gotten. I opened the truck door, reached under the seat and took out the leather bag that held all the money I had saved. I handed it to him and got into the truck, closed the door and rolled down the window.
“Give that to Mom or Leah. Tell them I’m sorry.”
“I’ll give the money to where it’s needed, but I’m not speaking for you, Joe. You need to do that for yourself.”
“It was good seeing you, Ben. Real good.” I started the truck and rolled up the window. As I pulled out of the parking lot, I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw him turn and head inside, the leather bag tucked under his arm.
I drove the whole way back to the cabin in the quiet, the hum of the road the only sound I could handle. I thought about the creases in Ben’s face, the slight stoop in his shoulders, his voice deeper than I remembered. I looked down at my hands, resting lightly on the steering wheel, the knuckles swollen and sore, the skin blotched with dark brown. I looked in the mirror and saw the creases around the frown I wore as a badge. Time had slipped away, had taken off without me.
“Fuck,” I whispered to myself. “Fuck,” I yelled out the window.
Route 9 seemed longer. The asphalt snaked into the distance. When I passed the supply store, a familiar calm began to settle over me, until I came up on the small road that led to my cabin. I pressed hard on the brakes and yanked the steering wheel. I parked the truck just before the turnoff and looked on in disbelief. Ruthie’s rock was gone. A hole was left in its place, a gaping hole in the ground. A pile of dirt lay next to it, ready to fill it in, ready to erase her completely. I could feel the tears before I knew I was crying. I kicked that dirt. I kicked it everywhere except that hole in the ground. I kicked and I screamed and I cried. When the coughing set in and sent me to my knees, I bowed down to breathe. Blood came from my lungs, and I cried harder. I grabbed at the dirt, hard and biting in my hands, and threw it away from where the rock once sat. I scattered the dirt until I fell, exhausted and struggling to breathe. I lay on the ground as the sky seemed to waver and crease, as the clouds shuttered and escaped. I breathed deep, painful gulps of air, forcing it into my lungs and forcing it out again. I don’t know how long I lay there. Probably not long but it felt like a lifetime.
Someone stopped, pulled a car up beside me and asked if I was okay. It took all the energy I had left in me to wave them on, to turn my head away so they wouldn’t see the thin lines running through the dirt on my face, the red spittle in the corner of my mouth. When the sound of the car was gone, I got up, slow, and pushed myself up off my hands and knees and stumbled to the truck. I didn’t turn down my little road to the cabin that had been mine for years. I didn’t return to the supply store or to the warehouse. This
time, my anger wasn’t holding me back. My sadness was throwing me forward. I headed north on Route 9, and when I came to the border, I parked the truck in the parking lot and walked across. The truck belonged to Mr. Ellis and I wasn’t a thief. I added his name to a long list of people I needed to beg forgiveness from. I was fifty-six years old when I walked past the place where Charlie took his last breath, and I sat, my back to the highway, my eyes to the trees as cars raced by me. A few honked, a reminder that the highway was no place to take a walk. I was just out of Saint Stephen, my thumb out and the sun in my eyes, when a car finally pulled over. I ran to catch up.
“I’m headed to Nova Scotia,” I blurted before I realized that Ben was at the wheel.
“Get in.” He reached into the back and grabbed the leather satchel I had handed him earlier that day and threw it against my chest. “You can take care of this now.”
I was going home.
Ben barely spoke a word to me the entire drive through New Brunswick and down the Valley highway. I stared out the window and watched as the green of New Brunswick gave way to the green of Nova Scotia. At the provincial border, giant windmills stood sentinel over the entrance to the place I once called home, their giant blades cutting the sky, ghosts in the light of dusk. When we finally pulled into the yard later that night, my stomach was aching with hunger and fear. As I crawled out of the car and stretched, the blue light of the television flickered in the picture window. Ben walked up to the door and held it open. I was taking off my shoes when Mae came around the corner from the kitchen, drying her hands with a dishtowel.
“Mom, you’re never going to believe what Ben brought home.” She laid the towel over the back of a chair, took my hand, gave it a squeeze and led me into the living room. No yelling, no blame, just a peaceful nod to my presence in my childhood home.
“Hi, Mom.”
She looked up from her chair, her hair white and thin, the pink of her scalp clearly visible. Her skin was creased and lined, and she reminded me of a dried apple doll. But her eyes were the same—the eyes that had loved me, nursed me back to health, held me when I cried, smacked me when I was bad, the eyes that were proud of me when I stayed hidden in the maple,
the eyes that said it wasn’t my fault when Ruthie went missing and when Charlie died, the eyes that glowed with pride when I married Cora.
“My Joe, you’re home.”
