Nights Below Station Street Read online

  “I don’t know,” Ralphie would say grinning, and looking confused.

  “What would you say if a woman became head of a corporation, Ralphie – would it baffle you?”

  The problem was, corporations in general baffled Ralphie because he didn’t know anything about them, so he didn’t see what the difference would be, one way or the other. But no matter – it seemed to Vera that corporations, lawyers, and professions were signposts to success if women accomplished them. And Ralphie, who had never known what to do with his life, seemed baffled and worried that he would say the wrong thing. And then he would smile and say joyously: “I don’t have any idea about them!” Hoping really that this would get him off the hook.

  Vera wanted to get straight all of what she no longer believed in, and all of what she believed in. It was important that all of this be settled immediately. One thing she wanted Ralphie to oversee was her lifelong fight with her mother, but as long as Adele was in the room, Vera would speak in a cryptic way, which she had to do for the sake of discretion.

  “How is she?”

  “Good, good,” Ralphie would say.

  And while they spoke like this, with Ralphie walking about the room, his hair white and dusty, and his eyes blinking as they always did when he was mulling over something, Adele would sit there, looking in wonder at them both.

  Adele did not know what Vera was talking about very often, but how Vera talked, how she thought, made an impression upon her nonetheless.

  For example, Adele only had a few things to wear. She had a couple of pairs of corduroys, a few pairs of jeans, some blouses, and the dresses that she had to wear to school. Since she had always been poor she didn’t know anything about dressing to look poor. However, it seemed as far as Vera was concerned, the less you considered your clothes or your looks, the better you were. And now Adele was always afraid of dressing too well in front of her. Or wearing make-up, which Vera hated.

  But the most particular thing Adele was worried about was that she might like something that Vera did not like, or show that she was foolish by saying something that Vera would not approve of.

  For instance, Vera did not approve of any of the movies that Ralphie and she went to see, where they ate licorice and drank pop. Ralphie would say: “Well we like um – that’s why we go see them – it’s fun.” And he would say fun and look at her, half apologetic about this fun-business.

  Ralphie would then brighten up again, and ask her if she still played the piano every day. She used to wake him up in the morning practising Mozart. She had taken piano lessons and studied hard at the convent. She never did anything with friends. Thelma bought her a pair of reachers for her fifteenth birthday and she went to a skating party at the cove, and came home early with frosted fingers, and said someone asked her about her privates. Then she had to invite someone to her high-school prom and didn’t want to, and Ralphie, who had never seen Vera go on a date, got a chair ready at five o’clock in the afternoon and sat in the hallway waiting for her boyfriend to arrive. Then Vera came downstairs in her long pink gown with her hair all done up in a thousand knotty little curls, which made her nose seem to be the most prominent part of her. Her father made too much of a fuss over her, walking around her and saying how beautiful she was.

  Then she trooped out the door – with her first cousin.

  When she went to university in 1967, things changed. At first she wrote home, but then after a time the letters stopped. Then they heard a rumour she was dating a black man, and walking about town with him, arm in arm, which made Thelma insomniac. They telephoned her, asked her questions, got into a shouting match, told her to come home. She said she would come home at Thanksgiving, with him.

  “You are not bringing anybody like him here – like the Belgian Congo or something – and have everyone saying things,” Thelma said. “Think of your father for one minute. Think of people here in town. And just remember who paid your tuition. If he knew it was a place like that, and everything going on now with these drugs – which make children hate their parents – and getting mixed up with professors, who now that they got a few degrees under their belts have become hippies, well, then – fine, Vera, fine. That’s just fine – little girl – that’s just fine.”

  Ralphie listened to one side of the argument and then the other. The world – the outside world – had suddenly crashed in on them.

  They got Ralphie to take a day off school and go to Fredericton to talk with her. Vera was pleased with her father’s and mother’s reaction, and a new Vera had come to the surface. A Vera who wanted more than anything else to be a Vera, and had wanted her mother and father to react just exactly like they did.

  Vera stayed away that Thanksgiving, and on into Easter.

  She did not come home and did not write, and the addresses they heard she lived at took on a peculiarly ominous tone.

  “My God – what did I do to deserve this?” Thelma would ask when Ralphie came in from school. “She’s living in a house on University Avenue for godssake!”

  Why this was so bad no one knew, but Thelma felt that it was. Then she felt that Vera was ungrateful and trying to ruin things for them.

  The big house suddenly displayed in its physical presence that winter all the problems the family was suffering. The windows were closed by white curtains, the upstairs felt cold when you walked through it Every night, Ralphie would take his net and hockey stick and go out on the street, riddled and panned with ice, and take slapshots from the driveway with its high snowbanks until Thelma called him in for supper.

  Ralphie did not know what to think about all of this. But then he began receiving letters from Vera. Thelma would hand him the letters, with the same look on her face he noticed the night she found out he was dating “the little Walsh kid.” Vera had drawn flowers and bees all over the envelopes.

  “Look at that,” Thelma would say almost hysterically. “Flowers and bees – flowers and bees.”

  Vera would write these letters using sayings she believed would impress her brother, always with that ironic irreverence towards the older generation – because they had made mistakes she herself had not yet had time to make.

  Vera and he had never been close, but now this pretence that they were close, and that Vera could only write to him, overshadowed his life. He was fifteen at that time and wanted to play road hockey and go to school, and liked a girl called Janie Mannie – whom everyone called JayMay – and he always thought of her like you would think of a bluebird.

  For a while that fall, Joe worked in the woods again. He would get out on the weekends, but during the week he would stay in his camp in the woods. He was cutting for a small mill in Renous. All about him was cut wood, piled haphazardly here or there, the smell of smoke and wet snow on the branches of black trees. He liked using a chainsaw and it didn’t bother him so much if he was sore in the morning. However there was one noticeable difference. That is, the way Rita looked at him when he came home on the weekends. She looked upon him now as if he was doing something that he couldn’t do. He had seen that look before, as concerned other men, but he had never reflected on it, and it had never bothered him. But now he looked upon this with a new perspective. She would pretend that she didn’t look this way, and that she wasn’t concerned about him, and she would growl at him for not taking his boots off, or leaving a set of cables on the seat of the truck – but all of this was done differently, as if she was worried about him and his back. He would hang his pants up over the door and lie down beside her, and she would tell him that Adele was acting strange, that Milly tried to paint two children with black paint, or that someone telephoned to ask about the fly rod that he was doing for them – yet all of this also was quite different When he flinched or was sore she would sometimes look over at him, and then pretend she hadn’t noticed it.

  On Saturdays, Allain Garret and he would go partridge hunting, and Joe would walk through the woods on small roads, bathed in cold light, as the partridge fanned themselves in
the gravelled dirt. At noon they would stop, boil water, and make themselves black tea – strong and thick and smelling of old poplar twigs – but Joe would always find that Rita had packed him something in his lunch that was special. And why this bothered him, as he looked up through the treetops to the blue sky, he did not know. He also felt that Rita had said something to Allain about him. The old man would look over at him, smiling in gratitude and kindness, at whatever Joe said.

  During the week he lived in a trailer. The trailer was made of plywood, and its windows were single pane. Sometimes one of the men from the mill would come in and stay a night with them and then leave before breakfast.

  Joe did not talk about himself at all. He was so strong he could use his arms instead of his back most of the time anyway. With his chainsaw going all day long, and with limbing and throwing trees out of the way, and working his way along the section he was cutting, he worked from just after dawn until just after dark most of the time.

  Because Joe was big, the other men often tried, in good fun, to throw him on his back. Some of the smaller men would give little whoops and jump out of the woods at him, and he would step sideways and push them down. Then some more of their buddies would try it Joe would be taking a break, tightening his chainsaw chain or putting more lubricant on, and he would hear a noise coming from the woods behind him. He would look about and see no one at all. But then as he turned back to his work, with a ham sandwich stuck in his mouth, he would hear the crack of a white birch twig, and look about again and see the top of a hat sticking up over the snow. He would turn about and smile, and bite down on his sandwich. Then he would see a stick coming out, and a belt tied to it, as they tried to snag his lunch bucket and haul it back into the woods. Just as they thought it was accomplished he would pick up a hunk of maple and drive it at the fellow. “Run the Jesus away from me lunch!” he would yell.

  He and a friend of his, Hector Runze, who had become one of the more reckless men Joe had ever known, stayed pretty close together. And sometimes the six others would team up against them in wars of attrition and wits.

  Hector, sitting on a stool in his humphrey pants, and looking out over the top of his eyes, would smile. “We’ll ambush them – tomorrow morning, even before they go in to cut,” he would say. “What I have to do tonight is rig up some sort of tree stand, and get up it – and then I’ll have a little surprise for them, mister man.”

  Then Hector would go about, planting the dynamite in the snow and running a wire, and getting things ordered. It might take him two days to do it.

  In fact, with the dynamite business it actually took him a week and a half to set it up properly, and Joe had forgotten completely about it. Until one morning when the rest of the men headed out into the woods, walking along, and as usual planning their offence for the day, there was a ka-boom to their left, down in the cut, and everyone went scrambling up over the hill through the woods, while Hector sat in the tree laughing, two big Kleenex sticking out of his ears.

  What the other men tried to do was separate them from one another and take them on one at a time. And the trailer itself, though small, became sectioned off into war camps. Joe and Hector would look out from behind their clothes they had put up to dry for the night, while the other men had mattresses or boxes shoved up in front of them. Then suddenly a boot would fly across the room, or a pan of some kind, and war would erupt again.

  There was a general truce during supper hour or a card game, or when someone was injured, like when Willie, who stood five foot four, tried to swing a stick at Joe and broke his own nose doing it.

  And in spite of this, the work went on each and every day.

  Nor did Joe tell Dr. Hennessey he was working in the woods, because he knew all hell would break loose. Hennessey had told him he could never work in the woods again, and if he ever found out he was doing it, he would get him fired.

  One evening, though, it was Joe’s turn to get water down at the brook, and he went along with his aluminum buckets. It was before supper and the woods were still, with the smell of ash and tree trunks rising up out of circular spools of snow, while everything grew darker along the footpath where he walked. It was up a slippery incline, and carrying two buckets filled with water, where he was attacked; he didn’t have time to put down his buckets, nor to use them as a weapon. When they grappled him by the legs he couldn’t hold his ground, and dropping his buckets, he went backwards, tumbling and sliding toward the brook.

  When he stopped sliding he knew he’d hurt his back again. The men tried to lift him to his feet, but he couldn’t stand, and they had to rig up a stretcher and carry him back to the trailer. It was the end of their war, but it was also the end of Joe’s job. He went home, and spent a week in bed.

  When he got back on his feet again, Joe would sometimes go to the curling club to watch Rita curl. Vye and Myhrra curled as well. Vye once upon a time had promised Joe a job at the mill where he worked. Joe liked Vye and had always liked people who were friendly to him. Vye always cursed and carried on unless women were present. As soon as a woman was present, Vye would look stone-faced at anyone who cursed.

  Now Myhrra and he were inseparable. He was always friendly to Joe and always asked him how the hunting and fishing were going, things which he did not do himself. So every time he saw him Joe would wait in the background until Vye finished doing something. Often Vye would be frowning, but the moment he saw Joe he would brighten up and exclaim something – about things which both he and Myhrra had decided Joe must have an interest in. Or he would ask Joe how he was.

  “Good, good,” Joe would say, smiling, looking down at the man wearing a big yellow tie, and then he’d start to stutter. Vye would listen to him, with friendly impatience as Joe explained how he was waiting for word from his applications. He never mentioned the mill. Vye would nod, and laugh at some joke Joe made. Then he would look out at the ice.

  Joe would stand there, lumbering over him, and smile, nod, not only to Vye, but to others around him when they came in, with a tear in his left boot and his woollen sock sticking out. Then he would clomp outdoors again, walking carefully along in the cold and go down to the rink to watch some intermediate hockey.

  Vye, like everyone else, knew about Rita. She was from down river. She had been at first year teacher’s college, and had had a boyfriend, but then for some reason ended up marrying Joe. And all of this seemed to him to be exactly the way things would be with her. He knew her family, and how she used to take care of her relatives, cooking for them from the time she was ten.

  “Hi, Rita, how are you right now!” he would shout when he saw her on the street the early part of that winter. Rita would have a scarf around her face, tied at the back of her neck in a knot, as the sun shone on the shovelsful of sand covering the ice, hauling two sleds of children along the sidewalk – so that all you saw were heads bobbing and puffs of breath coming.

  “I’m fine,” she would say. Then she would rush back and pin Doreen’s mitts on, or make sure Tammy’s hat was straight, or rush back to pick up a toy that one of the kids had dropped, her legs sturdy and tears in her eyes from the wind.

  Once Vye had asked Joe about the old mill Allain Garret owned at one time, and if Joe knew who he bought it off, or whatever became of the equipment. But after he asked this question he forgot about asking it, and didn’t think Joe would go about the river talking to people to get the information, and then come back one night when he was sitting at the curling club. Nor did Joe know until he did all this, that it would embarrass him. And sometimes when he went there Rita looked embarrassed as well. Rita was embarrassed with Joe at this time because she did not want Joe to embarrass himself. So she was always interrupting him when he spoke.

  When people told Joe they would get him a job, Joe never thought that they were just talking – he always assumed that they would.

  When Joe saw Vye he would often think of how busy he was, and how important, and he would try not to bother him. And Vye would lo
ok busy at just that instant, without even wanting to, perhaps, and later on he would point his finger, and say: “How’s everything, Joe?” And Joe would nod and smile.

  One night, however, when he thought Joe had left the building, because the outside door had slammed, Vye turned to Myhrra. “Good job – I told you to tell me if you see him coming. I don’t need to put up with Joe Walsh.”

  For a second, Joe smiled because he thought Vye knew he was still there, and was teasing him. But suddenly he realized that no one knew he was there. He was alone in the hallway. A storm was coming, there was a sound of a plough on the street, and all the buildings looked secretive and warm all of a sudden. Then he left the building and walked slowly off into the dark.

  Rita said she wanted Joe to curl with her, and he said he would. Everything was fine yet when he went out onto the ice he felt uncomfortable. He found it hard to keep down in the hack for any length of time. Vye was his instructor, and he showed him how to hold a broom and how to differentiate between the turns. But for some reason, Joe felt he could not fit in with them.

  Joe stood there watching, as Rita showed what she had learned. Then he picked up two stones and started to carry them about with him, lifting them over his shoulder, as if to make fun not only of his strength but of his general ignorance of the game. He had dug out an old red sweater from his closet, which he thought Rita would want him to wear. But when he looked at her, he realized he must have worn the wrong one, and when he threw a stone it broke the ice, wobbled, and came to a sudden halt. Then they tried a make-up game and Joe got more and more embarrassed.

  And suddenly it was settled, at forty-three everything was the way it should be, and there was nothing that shouldn’t be the way it was. And he felt that he had let her down in everything and this was just one more thing he would let her down with – because he felt he couldn’t and didn’t want to curl. He couldn’t curl because he felt Rita didn’t want him to. And yet if he told anyone, this is what he sensed, and it was the real reason he didn’t curl, not only wouldn’t they agree with him but they wouldn’t find any evidence that would support how he felt.