Year of Lesser (27 page)

Johnny stands beyond Avi and takes in the room. Everything’s open. The walls have been removed and big beams run along the ceiling. Mounted animals everywhere. Birds in a potted tree by the window. Butterflies pinned on cork. Bear rugs on the floor. Moose head on the wall. There’s a stand of guns over by the bookcase. Johnny turns now, thinks he should leave.

“You all right?” Avi asks.

“Sure,” Johnny says. “Why not?” He is certain now that she knows.

“Here,” Avi says, lightly pushing Johnny’s elbow. “Sit. I’ll get you a drink.”

She brings him a whisky. No ice. He works at this slowly while Avi settles herself in a low chair. She seems smaller now; Johnny is still standing, looking down at her.

Avi says, “Michael was at Chuck’s this morning. News is you’ve been trying out the role of Good Samaritan.”

“I don’t think people see it that way.”

“Well, it probably goes beyond their sense of goodness.” She pauses, rubs a finger lightly over one eyebrow, and says, “I’m surprised.”

“Yeah?” Johnny likes the feel of this house, even though it is a bit Michael-heavy. Avi leans to lick at her half-full snifter of rum. Each of
her little sips softens Johnny so that he begins to see her as an accomplice. Here is a woman, he believes, who understands him.

“Yeah,” she echoes. “Michael said people were upset.”

“A little,” Johnny says. He watches Avi’s hand run over a bare leg. Her skirt slid up when she sat and Johnny can see a bit of ripple in her thigh. The beginning of fat. He likes that, likes what it says about Avi Heath; that she eats well and likes to put sweet things in her mouth and doesn’t mind the look of herself in the mirror. Her fingers are long. Nails are chipped. That too is exciting, especially after the perfection of Loraine’s tiny hands. Avi’s movements are slow and sleepy. She’s been drinking for a while. Being here is like resurrecting Charlene. Johnny’s throat is on fire. He stands now and tiptoes the edges of the room, touching delicately at the animals.

“Michael doesn’t let me touch,” Avi says. “Just the rugs.”

Johnny ignores her. Strokes the head of what he thinks is a whisky-jack. He touches the neck of a Canada goose. “I quit my job,” he says. This is not true but Johnny thinks that it could be a possibility. Especially now that he’s said it.

“Oh.” She’s standing beside him now, also touching the goose. Her voice is in his ear. A whisper. “That’s my bird. Michael convinced me to go hunting that fall.”

Johnny wonders why she had it mounted. He turns and is looking at her jaw. Her hair is pulled behind her ear. She is turning grey.

He thinks that Avi would simply have to turn and then it would be Johnny and Avi all over the place, tearing up the rugs, knocking over delicate birds. But Avi keeps looking at the goose. She says, “You’re a strange man, Johnny Fehr. I didn’t like you at first. Despised you for the death of Charlene. But that’s not fair, is it? Not fair to Charlene, who had her own mind, her own furies. Do you ever miss her?”

“Now,” Johnny says. “Right now I do.”

Avi pulls back. Her mouth parts and her glass goes up. “More?” she asks, taking his glass, tearing away, moving towards the kitchen.

Johnny experiences both regret and relief. He has a memory of Loraine, way back, in the egg room. He’d never even kissed her before
and they’d been talking when Loraine stood and walked over to Johnny and fell into his arms. Or he fell into Loraine’s. It was never quite clear. They kissed, long and hard. After, they were more pleased than surprised. Then, Loraine pushed him away and backstepped. “That’s enough,” she said. “I want you to come back.”

Johnny, hearing Avi clink bottles now in the other room, is despondent. He has the urge to go, to leave this house and this woman. He sits. Waits for his drink.

Coming back to him, the amber liquid waving in the glass, a plate of crackers balanced in one hand, Avi is more distant, more clear-headed. “You make foolish decisions, Johnny. You never should have taken Melody to the States. Realistically, you could be arrested.”

“She’s sixteen,” Johnny responds.

“Ah, but if it were pushed by her father, he’d have a point. You probably pretended to be this girl’s father, right?”

Johnny nods, tired now of Avi’s presumptions. Thinks she knows everything.

“You should have passed her on,” Avi continues. “To a counsellor. Her mother.”

“That’s what you would have done?” Johnny asks.

Avi smiles. She reaches for the Saltines. Eats them greedily. “How about Loraine? This must have been a shock to her.”

“She detests me,” Johnny answers.

Avi doesn’t respond to this confession. She licks the top of a cracker. Her long tongue repulses Johnny.

“I gotta go,” he says.

“I’ll tell Michael you came,” Avi says. She kisses him at the front door, sweet rum passing onto his lips. But Johnny is cured by now. He’s remembering Loraine, and right now, walking away from Avi, he thinks she’d be pleased, proud of him.

He goes back to his land. To the farm where only rubble remains. In the dark he pitches the pup tent alongside the row of spruces lining the driveway, unzips his sleeping bag and crawls in. The grass beneath the tent is uncut and so is high and soft. He sleeps deeply, waking once during the night to the sound of a small animal, perhaps a skunk, scuffling on the other side of the nylon. The animal leaves. The wind pushes at the trees. The night is dark, no moon. He sleeps again and rises in the early light, hungry. But he has no food. Poor planning.

He drives to Île des Chênes, taking the gravel road past Loraine’s farm, casting a longing eye at the stillness of her house. He stops at her driveway and retrieves the boxes of clothes she has dumped beside the ditch. Rising from the depths of his trunk he hesitates and listens, hoping for the sound of the screen door slamming, the dog barking, the pad of her rubber boots. But everyone’s still sleeping.

He has toast and coffee at a small restaurant and then wanders the countryside. This is Saturday. He follows a similar routine on Sunday: out past Loraine’s, breakfast in a foreign town, rolling up and down the country roads. Near the end of the day he pulls into Lesser and stops at Chuck’s for cigarettes. He considers having coffee as well. He steps into the restaurant and discovers Melissa Emery sitting in a booth touching shoulders with Eleanor and across from them are Melody and Phil. All four are leaning forward and almost knocking heads. They don’t see Johnny, so he pays and leaves, but not without first seeing Melody’s hand go up to Phil’s shoulder and Phil turning and looking at her, his face astonished.

The following day, Monday, is a holiday, the August long weekend. The roads are empty. People are resting. By midafternoon Johnny finds himself puttering along the river road west of Lesser away from St. Adolphe, towards the Rat River bridge, the same bridge he smashed into last fall. He remembers this accident ruefully, touching now at his jaw, the tiny scar on his cheek. There is a gathering at the river today. On the east side. Hundreds of cars. Johnny, curious, parks his Olds and steps down a newly made path between scrubby oaks to the rear of a crowd of people. Johnny wonders if this is a baptism, just like the old days
before the invention of indoor tanks. It isn’t.

A man is speaking to the crowd. He talks of Mennonites and settlers. And then a younger man with a blue-and-red tie takes over and he explains how the first eighty or so families of Mennonites arrived here by riverboat in 1874 from Fargo. Came up the Red River and decided to settle here.

Johnny realizes that his grandfather could have been on that boat. Or a later one. He’s not at all sure but the possibility excites him. He thinks how beliefs, or greed, or bad or good luck, or the simple meandering of life, brought people to these banks and those people had children and the children had children and Johnny might be one of the offspring. He realizes he’s happy to have his own child. Rebecca. Odd. History has never excited Johnny but it moves him now.

He circles the edge of the crowd. He knows a few people, not many. He stands beside an older couple. The man has grey hair, a large nose. Johnny recognizes him as his old high school principal. Johnny used to be good friends with this man’s son. The man turns as Johnny attempts to sidle away.

“Johnny Fehr?”

Johnny nods and grins. Shakes hands with the couple and then the salesman side of him takes over. He’s good at this. Chats comfortably with his old principal, who must remember him as a scoundrel, a poor student. There is a vague memory of kicking the headlights out on this man’s car. Those were angry times.

Johnny asks about their son, recalling that he was a bit of a writer. He mentions this and the older man laughs politely, dismissing the fact. Says his son is a teacher. Has four children. Then Johnny talks about himself, about the youth centre he runs, his new baby, his job at OK Feeds. He gives the impression that his life is solid and for a moment he believes it himself. Believes that when he goes home tonight he will find Loraine and Rebecca and Chris waiting for him.

Later, driving away from the gathering, he feels full of goodwill.

A week passes. During this time Johnny does not hear from Loraine. Chris is absent from work; he just stops coming. Johnny drives by Loraine’s late one night and catches a glimpse of someone standing in the light by the window. He thinks maybe it’s Loraine holding Rebecca but he can’t be sure. He drives to his land and fires up the stove. Heats up a can of noodle soup. Eats it out of the pot. He has discovered the water from the old well that stands beside the machine shed. The pump was rusty and unused but a few shots of oil eliminated the squeaks and after several gushes of brown the water flowed clear and cold. He goes now to clean the pot. The night is humid. He strips and puts his head under the pump. Washes his hair. Soaps his armpits, his chest, his crotch. He stands naked, swatting mosquitoes, towelling himself dry with a clean T-shirt. Lightning dangles in the west. Muffled thunder.

The storm hits after midnight. Johnny wakes, his fingers and toes rigid. The lightning and thunder are inside his tent. The wind and rain flatten him. Within fifteen minutes he is lying in a pool of water. He scrambles out into the rain and runs to his car. He finds shelter there, though it is stuffy and the windows fog up. He removes his wet T-shirt and underwear. His clean clothes are in the car trunk, so he must huddle on the seat, shivering. He idles the car and blows heat around until his head drops and he sleeps. He wakes an hour later with a sore neck and an erection. He was dreaming of Loraine and Chris; they were making love and Johnny was watching.

Johnny believes that Loraine will come looking for him. And when she does he will neither gloat nor mock her. There is a lot of room inside Johnny for everyone’s foibles. He is a trusting man; he feels full of luck. Love too. He used to lie beside Loraine at night and listen to her sleep and he would offer thanks for her, touching lightly at her knuckles, her toes, her knees, her hipbones, her belly, her ribs, the mole on her neck. “Thanks,” he would whisper and his body would tremble with impatience and delight.

He realized that this had little to do with sex. If she never again allowed him to enter her, he would still worship her. He imagined her as
a vessel full of seeds, a ripe and lovely fruit perhaps, and many times he opened his wide mouth and tried to fit her head, her hands, her feet, inside him. During those moments his body ached.

Johnny finds that his waking hours follow the pattern of the sun. He is beginning to enjoy this: the early rising, the priming of the stove, the blisters produced by the work with the pump and the axe, the small fires before bedtime, and even the digging of a latrine, a hole deep enough to bury his own shit. Everything is simplified and labour-filled. There is no shortage of time. He goes to work, avoids the office, stays out of the way of Lesser and its awful pity. Does his shopping in other towns. He fancies himself a settler of sorts, though he misses TV.

And then, on a Wednesday night, ten days after she asked him to leave, Loraine comes to find Johnny. Though the daylight has barely disappeared, Johnny has already taken shelter in his tent. He hears a car pull up. A door opens. Footsteps, and someone is standing on the other side of the thin nylon.

“Johnny?” A whisper.

Johnny unzips the flap and sees Loraine and the baby. Rebecca is sleeping; a log in her arms. “Climb in,” Johnny says. The hair rises on his arms as Loraine crouches past him and brushes up against his waist. She sits cross-legged at the far end where Johnny usually lays his head. She’s a shadow. Johnny lights a cigarette and for a few seconds the warmth of the flame becomes a common focus. The flare also offers Johnny a view of Loraine’s face; fatigue there, dark eyes, heaviness. Is this the woman he loves? He leans closer as if to identify her. He perceives grief. The match goes out.

“Welcome,” Johnny says.

“Chris is gone,” Loraine responds. Her mouth is slow, full of rocks.

Johnny realizes now that her grief has little to do with him. A tug of disappointment. Resentment towards Chris. And then, as Loraine sobs
and snuffles, Johnny begins to understand that children can kill you. He reaches out, takes the sleeping Rebecca. His daughter. She’s a foreign object. Has so little to do with who he is, his own private anguish. He wonders at Loraine’s lack of self these days, at how consumed she is by Chris and Rebecca. The baby arcs her back and opens her mouth. A lazy yawn, a grasping of paws. Johnny pats her and shushes softly.

“He left a week ago,” Loraine says. “None of his friends are talking. The police think I’m an idiot. Kids that age often run, they say. Then they come back. They always come back. I went to Winnipeg last night. Drove for hours around downtown, hoping to see Chris. Nothing. Rebecca screamed and hollered. I hollered back until finally the little thing slept.”

Johnny kisses the baby’s head. Again.

“I keep thinking he’s dead,” Loraine says. “Can you help?”

Johnny wishes he were as tiny as Rebecca right now. Then he could lie in Loraine’s arms. Burrow beneath her shirt and come up weary from excess.