Year of Lesser (3 page)
She looks up at him standing in the low doorway and she doesn’t look surprised. “Go put on the kettle,” she says. “I’ll be there.”
When she comes into the house she’s changed into jeans and a black sweater that buttons up the back. She takes off her shoes at the door; she’s not wearing socks. She stands on tiptoes and washes her hands at the sink and Johnny sees the bottoms of her bare feet, the insteps like two milky stains. They don’t talk for a while, just sit across from each other and clink spoons against saucers. Finally Loraine says, “News has it you’re saved.”
Johnny pulls at an earlobe and tilts his head. “I guess.” He sighs, lights a cigarette and offers Loraine one. Sometimes she smokes, today she takes one. The cigarette sits deep in the crotch of her fingers, unlit until she takes Johnny’s hand and guides a match close to her mouth. Her eyes blink and her lips wet the filter and she says, “Thank you.” Johnny finds her smallness exhilarating. So tight. She smokes half the cigarette and then puts it out. “Makes me dizzy,” she says. Johnny watches her fingers move and thinks she wants to touch his hands. “I sure wish I could be saved sometime,” she says.
Johnny searches her face for mockery but knows he won’t find it. Loraine doesn’t have Charlene’s cynicism. He snorts, “What do you mean?”
“Exactly that.”
“Aw, you don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s silliness, really.
It’s for fools like me who think maybe if they can talk in tongues, they’ll be a better person.”
Loraine keeps pressing. “And each time you do this you release a few sins, I guess?” This evokes for Johnny the image of a child freeing helium balloons into the sky. He smiles but does not answer. He does not really like to talk about his own salvation, because unless he is in the throes of redemption the entire act seems ridiculous, made up, a poorly told tale.
“I believe in sin,” Loraine says, and her face is so bright and cheery that Johnny lets her go on. “Sin is spending your whole life worrying about it.” Her nose moves up and her nostrils become black holes.
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“I saw Charlene this morning. She said hello to me and then I paid my bills and she gave me the three twenties I asked for. We talked about her reading club. She said I should come. I said that sounded nice. Mostly women. Why is it, do you think, that men don’t like that kind of thing?”
Johnny has this sense of things not being right. Loraine is too happy, too much in control. Normally by now they’d be holding each other or he’d have said,
Do you want to?
and they’d have laughed and done it. He’s breathing through his mouth and watching Loraine’s knees, her chin, throat, thighs, hands. White hands, like those perfect eggs she gathers.
Loraine says, “Charlene said you’d left. It was strange her telling me that, sometimes I wonder if she knows about you and me, and for a bit there I felt close to her like we could be friends. I said I hadn’t seen you, I mean selling feed, and now here you are.”
“I haven’t left her.” Johnny takes Loraine’s hand. He likes her gullibility. She’s like him in a way, great intentions but a weak eye for completion. It’s the things of the flesh that throw them off and that’s why they’d make a poor couple. But that doesn’t stop Johnny now. He talks about Chris, Loraine’s son, about seeing him at the drop-in centre where they talked about skating, about boards and half-pipes.
“That’s so good,” Loraine says. She breathes quicker when talking about Chris. She holds Johnny’s fingers and they talk about drugs and
girls. Her boy is fascinated by both, she says. Johnny promises to help Chris. “The boy’s good, he’s smart.” Then Loraine has her hands on Johnny’s head and neck and then they’re down his shirt and she’s whispering, “Jesus, Johnny, Jesus, you’ve got me way down deep.”
After, when Johnny is playing with her hands, her beautiful hands, Loraine says, “Who are you?” He feels her breath on his cheek and he doesn’t answer, he just keeps touching her hands. They are soft considering the heavy work she does. But she wears gloves all the time and in the evenings she pours lotion on her palms and she smooths the lotion around over her knuckles and up her wrists. Then she works carefully at her fingernails with tiny tools and she paints her nails. She paints them the colour of her hands, like the inside of a large seashell, so Johnny, when he holds them close like he’s doing now, has a hard time seeing her nails. He takes one of her hands and holds it over his nipple and she pinches him lightly while he thinks about her question.
Johnny doesn’t like questions like this. It reminds him of exams and impossible expectations and gnawing on pens. Stupid questions about people long dead, about history. Questions that have nothing to do with those small breasts there that a few minutes before he took into his mouth. “Here,” he had said and filled his mouth with one and then the other and measured them with his tongue. Then he smelled them and he was reminded of when he was a boy and he sucked on his arm and laid his nose on the wet spot that was left.
Charlene told him once,
You have no sense of yourself other than what you need.
That may be true, Johnny thought, but not so bad. And now, listening to Loraine breathe, watching her breasts rise, then fall, rise again, knowing she is waiting for an answer, he says, “I’ve known joy. Not all the time and maybe never for very long, but I’ve known joy.”
The drop-in centre remains closed Friday and Saturday. Johnny doesn’t show up. After Loraine tells him he can’t spend the night because of
Chris, he drives out to St. Adolphe where he sits in the bar and drinks shooters with guys he knows and some he doesn’t. There are a few women present too, women around forty with soft stomachs and last names like Rochelle and Laperriere. There’s one younger woman who reminds Johnny of Loraine; she’s thin-mouthed and skinny and wears jeans. Johnny knows a guy from St. Adolphe, Ronald Lavallee, and he spends Friday night at Ronald’s house. He finds himself back in the bar on Saturday afternoon trying to talk to the girl in jeans.
“Who are you?” Johnny asks.
“The waitress.”
“What’s your name?” Johnny presses, but the girl ignores him.
Johnny loads himself up and by early evening he is in his half-ton and driving. He tries to remember where he’s going but he can’t. The road is empty and Johnny figures he’s driving slowly down the middle. The trees pass him and he misses the turn to Lesser. Then a curve appears and the Rat River bridge and he feels a jolt as he rubs the guard rail and rolls to a stop on the edge of the grassy embankment. He puts the half-ton in park and falls asleep.
Two fishermen wake Johnny Sunday morning. They are wearing green hats and checked jackets and they’re standing outside his truck saying, “Lucky,” and “Yeah, one lucky fellow,” and then one guy pokes his head in the door and asks, “You okay?”
“Sure, sure.”
“You’re lucky.”
Johnny doesn’t answer. After the men have slid down the slope to the river and walked up to the point, Johnny climbs out of the truck and looks at a big hole in the guard rail. “Quite a blow,” he mumbles. He stares down at the river which has slowed now in fall and then he looks at the trees and he figures they’re poplars but he’s never been terribly sure about trees. He sits on the ground with his back up against the wheel of his truck and he watches the men in green jackets still-fishing by the point. His stomach hurts. He has a bruise on his cheek where he hit the steering wheel. His hands shake.
He goes to church that morning. First he drives home to see Charlene but she’s not there. The same dirty dishes are still in the sink and this surprises him. He showers and drives to town. He goes to the Mennonite Brethren church, the one he attended as a child. It’s a big brick building with a blue rug on the main floor and oak pews with blue cushions. Johnny sits near the back. He hears the songs, the organ, the voices all around him but he doesn’t really listen. At one point he considers standing and relating his own personal experience but there is something about the woman in front of him, perhaps the angle of her neck, that stops him. He lifts his eyes once during a prayer and studies the vaulted ceiling. Between the varnished rafters, at their base, run narrow rectangular windows that reveal the blue sky. There are pigeons roosting outside those windows. Johnny watches the pigeons and then the sun flows through the windows and strikes the far wall just above the heads of the people praying. They stop praying and begin to sing. The sunlight reminds Johnny of warm hands, all one colour, and of how, eyes watering in the wind, Loraine squeezed his leg and said long ago, “And you know, Johnny, I could, really.” There is a goodness in people, he thinks, that is remarkable.
Loraine calls Johnny at work on a Friday afternoon to tell him the news but he’s not in and she won’t give the secretary a message. She doesn’t say who’s speaking, just hangs up. She phones his house later that evening but Charlene answers and so Loraine has to make small talk; the book club, the bonspiel, work, farming. Just before Loraine hangs up, she says, “Oh, Johnny wouldn’t be there, would he? It’s about some feed mix.”
Charlene’s voice is cheery and ignorant. “No,” she says, “He’s at the centre.”
Loraine sits by the phone, pushes a pencil around on a paper, and considers calling the centre. She hesitates because her son Chris might be there and she dislikes giving the impression of meddling in his life. The dog is scratching at the back door so Loraine lets him in. She holds the door open a while and pokes her head out and looks up and breathes the air. She can hear a car passing by on the mile road over by the Loepky farm. It’s a cool October night, close to Halloween, and there’s a smell of smoke; some farmers are burning stubble.
The generator over by the second barn is faltering; it’s been like that for a few months. Loraine figures it’ll just go one of these cold
nights and then the emergency generator will have to cut in and if it doesn’t, she’ll have ten thousand dead chickens. Chickens are stupid. She closes the door, rubs her bare arms, and considers that if people were locked in cages, in groups of three and four, they’d be stupid too, or deviants, or homosexuals. She wanders back to the phone and picks it up. She can smell herself on the receiver. She likes that. She curls up in an armchair, folds her small legs under her, and punches at the numbers.
A kid answers. Loraine can hear music in the background. She would like to ask this kid about Chris. Is he there? But instead she says, “I want to talk to Johnny Fehr.”
And then, after a few minutes, she hears his voice and for a moment she can’t speak. She’s been aching to tell him, walking around sucking on this secret for several weeks and now, at this point, she wants the giddiness of telling.
“Johnny?” she says, “It’s me.”
He seems neither pleased nor concerned. Loraine tries to imagine him, the way he looks standing by the phone. He’ll be wearing jeans and she likes that. She knows he’s smoking, she can hear him draw, even though he’s got a no-smoking rule for the centre.
“We have to talk,” she says. She lifts her eyebrows and says, “Is tomorrow okay?”
Johnny hums. The phone crackles as he shifts and stubs his cigarette. “What’s wrong?” he asks.
Loraine’s mouth is dry. This was supposed to be fun, she thinks. “Nothing,” she says, “I got some news.”
Johnny’s thinking. Loraine can tell. And then he says, “Listen, I’m going up to Sprague tomorrow, talk to a customer. You wanna come? For the morning?”
“Yes,” Loraine says, too quickly perhaps. She’s holding herself, one palm on her stomach, and she’s remembering the way Johnny looks when he stands by the window and puts on his shirt. He rarely tucks in his tails and a couple of buttons are missed and this could be sloppiness to some
people but to Loraine it’s what and who Johnny Fehr is and she loves him. “Yes,” she says again.
Johnny is leasing a Ninety-eight Olds. It’s dark green and serious. Saturday morning Loraine sits in the front seat, runs her hand over the upholstery, and thinks that she prefers the half-ton. It has a smell of oil and grain and she likes the way Johnny looks behind the wheel. This new car makes him look too earnest.
They’re mostly quiet driving down the Number 52 through Steinbach, but when they turn onto the Number 12 and it begins to snow, tiny flakes melting on the windshield, Loraine talks about an aunt who lives in Grunthal. “She’s got twelve kids,” she says. “They live in a three-bedroom house and the husband’s a mechanic.”
Johnny doesn’t answer. He’s playing with the radio. “I love this,” he says. “They’re a family, I think. The Rankins. I saw them once on TV and they all look beautiful.” He lights a cigarette and offers Loraine one. She shakes her head and Johnny looks at her, surprised.
“Anyway,” Loraine says, “this aunt wanted all those children, just wanted them. Two died in a car accident. She still has ten. It’s hard to imagine.” Loraine knows Johnny is waiting for her to talk, to say what she has to say, but she’s thinking now that something’s wrong, that when she finally really talks he won’t listen.
She says, “I gather eggs. Twice a day. I take six at a time. Three in each hand. It’s strange these days to handle eggs. Not that they’re fertilized in any way but still it’s odd. I used to candle eggs at the hatchery. Watch them as they ran over a scanner, look for flaws, blood spots, bubbles of air. Sometimes I could see right into them, like I was looking into a perfect glass stone.” She pauses, reaches out, and takes Johnny’s right hand off the wheel and presses his palm against her stomach. “Here,” she whispers.
Johnny’s tongue is touching his top lip and his eyes wrinkle. He’s
taking her words and running them around in his head. Finally, he bangs a palm against the steering wheel. “Aw, no, Loraine, really?” A noise rises from his chest. Loraine cannot tell if this is joy or sorrow. But he turns and he smiles and “Yes,” he says.
“You’re happy then?” Loraine asks. “Really?”
And Johnny is, she can see that. Even later, after talking about it for a while, he hits at his leg. His excitement affects Loraine. Her fingers shake. She remembers this one time as a teenager, sitting on the rocks at Winnipeg Beach. She was wearing a bathing suit and talking to some boy she’d met two days earlier. She could sense the heat escaping from the boy’s skin and her bum felt the roughness of the rock. Her buttocks feel now as if they’ve been scraped along rock.
