When Fenelon Falls. Dorothy Ellen Palmer
got sprayed with mud, rocking us from behind. (Just like the snowdrifts between the house and the barn, I told myself. Should be as easy as Mumsie’s Five-Minute Pie!)
We headed the last few miles skiing through swamp, driving right up over sidewalks and front lawns. Any path in a storm. I don’t think we ever said her name. (We should have figured that any hurricane that could wipe out bridges and swallow Packards could do a great deal worse to a rickety old trailer, but we were so cold and tired and just plain done that we weren’t thinking, period.) It was almost light and we were almost there when Angus joked that Gladys, being Gladys, had no doubt made a pot of hot chocolate, drank the whole pot, and made some more. We could all but taste it! That’s why the police cordon at the foot of Brown’s Line took us so much by surprise. Fire trucks. Ambulances. A policeman who said no, we couldn’t go farther. Angus jumped out. ‘Of course we can! She lives there,’ he yelled, pointing back at my face in the car. ‘She lives there with my sister!’
I’ll always remember the even look in that officer’s eyes. His voice so soft and slow as he gripped Angus by the shoulder, ‘Not anymore, son. Not anymore.’
He took us to the Red Cross truck. A nurse gave us coffee. I was taking my first sip when the officer said the storm had decimated the trailer park and all the little cottages around it and handed us a survivor list. No Gladys. We read it three times. No G. Campbell. He said the injured had been taken to St. Joe’s Hospital. No sister on that list either. No roommate. No best friend since kindergarten. But Angus stayed calm. Clear. Efficient. He gave his mom’s number, his work number, Mumsie’s number and my work number. He gave a description: Age twenty-three. Blond hair, five-foot-four, hazel eyes. Distinguishing features: Green cat’s-eye glasses. A chipped tooth, earned smiling all the way to the ground riding a two-wheeler for the first time, age nine. Occupation: Student, Lakeshore School of Beauty. He asked me what she weighed and I lied. (Mumsie told me later not to feel guilty, said it was the least I could do for poor Gladys, who’d always been a wee bit porky.) Angus shook the officer’s hand. And then he just stood there, looking out at the first silver rays of dawn. I had to call him back to the car.
Then he drove. Fast. Wild. Much wilder than necessary. To God-knows-where-but-I-don’t. Not home. To some back street in Mimico, some deserted factory parking lot too near the creek for my liking. He slammed to a stop and began to shake. He wouldn’t meet my eye. He jumped out, stood there lost, then opened the back door. I waited. Then I joined him.
Blood? Blood on his hands? No, preserves. He was eating it with his fingers. All five of them. Scooping sweetness as if he were starving. I wished he’d say something; I wished I could. He held out a finger, ‘Try it.’ I licked and he crumpled his mother’s note in his other hand. Then with two hands, he tore it to pieces. Jam looks even more like blood on paper. He began to cry. So I held him.
I held on when tears turned to kisses. When kisses deepened, I returned them. When his hands, hands that had been so professional on the steering wheel, so calm writing his sister’s name, so respectful shaking the officer’s hand, when those hands got mean, ripped my blouse and tore my skirt, I’m sure I asked him to stop. Sure but not certain. All I’m certain of is that as light crept into the car, not ten feet away, a shape slowly shifted clear. What’s that line in the Bible? ‘And the void became substance, became words.’ Something like that.
Maybe the floating shape had been a sheep because this shape was unarguably a cow, a very dead, very bloated cow, upside down in a factory parking lot in Mimico, a beast on her back with two feet pointing skyward and two broken beneath her. With jelly brown eyes, she watches me. When I should be sleeping, I watch her watching me. Dead eyes quiver with each thrust.
And this place isn’t any better. The only decent person in here is the night cleaner, an older man with the musical name of Carmelito Trigliani. At night he comes into my room, pats my hand and says notta to dwell on dark things. He says the sleepawalking comes froma da dark things. Thatta a wedding is justa da ticket! There’s a’nothing like a bella bride to cheera us up! (He talks like that, in exclamation points with anna accent!) He put his hand on my shoulder before the nurses wheeled me from my big red brick building to the small red brick building, the one with a rubber floor, ‘Trusta him, the doctore. He knows whatsa best.’
When Mumsie heard about the electroshock, she said, ‘Good, if we’re lucky a few thousand volts will solve all our problems.’ But I overheard her complaining to Janie. Mumsie kept insisting that it’s not her fault, that even a good cow may have a bad calf, that at least she got one daughter right. To my face she says that women have nothing but their bodies to bargain with, and now that I’ve played all my cards, the only sure bet is to put that ring on my finger, right quick. Janie nods. They’re all so certain they must be right. They’re all so right they must be certain. They take me on walks by the lake. To see water. The stupid cows.
But hurricanes have eyes. And that Hazel, she was one smart cookie. She took one look at Toronto the Good and what did she do? She flooded the subway. One of their precious tunnels collapsed. They think if they repair it quickly I’ll forget, but I wasn’t born yesterday. I was reborn in a hurricane; I’ve got second sight. I’m plugged into the quivering universe. She will be a girl. I will give her Gladys’s locket and Granny’s name. Will she ever see Inverness? I hope so. See, I’m not crazy; I don’t claim to know everything.
Here’s what I do know. As nasty as the rushing water of a hurricane is, it’s exactly the colour of the coffee we put to our lips every day. Dirt brown. Hurricane Hazel Brown. The taste of Angus – three cream, no sugar. Last week when he finally came to see me, and I got brave enough to ask him what happened, he looked at the ceiling. When I started to cry, he stared at the floor, ‘For Chrissake, my sister died. That’s it. That’s all. Enough said.’
So, I can swallow that for the rest of my life or I can spit him out and start clean. I should have said, ‘Angus, you taste just like what you are – plain old country cow shit.’
Mumsie says nice girls don’t swear, but I no longer qualify. I’m about to be a married woman. And Walter, when he proposed at my bedside yesterday, his hand thumbing my knee, assured me that grown-up wives with aspiring bank manager husbands to instruct them don’t have to listen to their Mumsies (especially not to Maladroit Mummified Maters like mine).
GOOD OLD ROCK ’N’ ROLL
The drive that got us to the cottage that summer of ’69 was, much like the family in the Ford, a day late and tender short. It occurred uncharacteristically in broad daylight, on Saturday morning, the 28th of June. Had we followed the Departure Protocol, our car Tessie would have joined the Friday night diaspora of the last day of school. Ordinarily, MC rocketed around the house all afternoon, ordering Jordan about in a frenzy of cleaning and packing, both of them tripping over our springer spaniel, Balsam, who knew that barking makes women pack faster. We couldn’t waste a nanosecond. MC’s self-imposed countdown had us blasting off the second Dad engaged the screen door. But that night broke the routine. Jordan walked no farther than the triangle between couch, radio and TV, surfing our three U.S. stations. Mom’d start pouring cereal or powdered skim milk into mouse-proof jars, then find an excuse to join her.
‘What earth-shaking event had transpired?’ you ask. Not transpired, expired. Judy Garland – she died. A week of footage already: Judy dancing with Mickey, clanging trolleys and ringing bells. Judy singing ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ after JFK’s assassination. Judy, Judy, Judy. Just get over the bloody rainbow and be done with it.
Apparently not. Friday was her funeral, so of course they played The Gizzard of Boz yet again. I had to listen to BS redeclare it ‘the number-one-all-time-best-possible-movie-ever-in-the-history-of-the-possible-world!’ I had to watch Little Miss Chubby Pigtails outwit a twister and a witch, lions and tigers and bears, only to discover what most of us already know. When a network bulletin interrupted to announce a riot after a police raid on Stonewall, a men’s bathhouse in Greenwich Village, and Jordan asked why didn’t they have tubs, Mom snapped the Gizzard off and told her to go pack something. But when Dad got home, he found the TV on and them side by side on the couch blubbering at some clicking ruby slippers, snotty Kleenex