Mrs. Mike by Benedict Freedman

A child twisted into a terrible knot and died. The mother covered her head and moaned.

  "On the gray wings of dawn she went."

  Yes, the sun was up, but the light from it was cold. The dead in the trees looked at us. The living writhed and choked and spat. And I moved among them, empty. Pain, tiredness, nothing touched me. Once a pair of little arms reached out to me, and I thought: Why these? Something hurt in me when I looked at the two children who were going to live, that were getting better.

  I went for more water. Famished shapes slunk after me, but they kept at a distance.

  I should have felt sorry for these starving animals, but I didn't. I didn't feel anything. "Poor dogs!" I said, and I remembered that I had always had dogs and always loved them. But it meant nothing to me. And then I couldn't remember what meant nothing. I just knew the pail was very heavy. I followed my own footsteps back. I filled, poured, dipped, wrung, cooked, fed.

  An old man carried in the body of an old woman. "I been to hill of white crosses," he said. "Snow much deep, ground much hard for old man."

  His daughter, the mother of the three children, said without turning, "Put her in tree."

  Tears ran down the old man's face. He picked up his burden again and went shuffling out. A moment later there was a cry. I looked out. A dog was tugging at the small shrunken corpse. The old man pulled and fought, but it was torn out of his hands. The dog ran off, dragging his prize, growling in his throat. The old man stumbled after him. The dog dropped the body, and with his eyes on the old man, began rending and tearing it. The old man, sobbing, flung himself on the dog, beating it with feeble hands.

  I came at the dog with my stick, but by the time I reached him, the old man was mangled.

  A gray dog moved in and fought the tawny one, and while they fought I pulled the old man away. I dragged him to the tepee, but he was dead, and the gray dog was dead. I turned away from the sight of the tawny one as he stood bristling over the shriveled corpse.

  Some time after that, Sarah found me. She took me back to Mike. Part of the way she carried me.

  Twenty-five

  The cribs were gone. I never asked Mike what he had done with them. Mary Aroon's crayon drawings were gone, too. I waited until Mike was out and then hunted the house over for them. I guess I was glad that I didn't find them.

  Mike was gone every day. He and Tim and Tim's father, old Georges Beauclaire, buried half a village that week. It was mostly the children that went, and the old people.

  The second night Mike had taken me up the hill. We had walked between the rows of white crosses. Was the sorrow of other days like the sorrow of now? Did each neat whitewashed cross mean empty pain?

  A little past the summit of the hill, a new row had been added. These crosses had not yet been stained or salted. But cut into the wood I read the name Mary Aroon Flannigan, and next to this, Ralph Flannigan. My two babies lying on this bare, windswept hill! I knelt down and laid my hands on the snow. I remembered the day, almost three years before, when Mike and I and our baby daughter had ridden into Grouard. I remembered seeing this hill and the bright crosses. Hadn't I known then for a moment? Hadn't I seen myself wandering through the rows that stretched horizontally, then end to end, and then crisscross in shifting geometric patterns?

  I had been afraid when Constance told me of her children, the one she hadn't named and the others. What warning could be plainer than her words, "The women here speak of their first family, their second and third families." Why hadn't I taken my children then, away from this country that had killed them? Why hadn't I taken them to antitoxin and doctors, out of these frozen winters?

  I got up and followed Mike home. What had happened to us, to Mike and me? I wanted to reach out to him, but I couldn't. At first I didn't know why, and then I realized that I was blaming him. Did he feel it? Did he feel the thoughts that lay there, heavy and unspoken between us? He had very little to say to me. He was sweet and kind and patient, only he'd look away from me. And when he thought I was busy with something else, he'd stare at me. I couldn't sleep because of the way he'd look at me. But there was a bitterness I couldn't force back. He'd known. He'd lived in this country. He'd seen what it did to families. Every winter he'd seen children die in epidemics. He knew how virulent even a simple disease like measles was among the Indians. And he knew that in all the Northwest there was no help. He hadn't had the right to bring a wife into this country. He hadn't had the right to have children.

  Eight days later the last of the graves had been filled in. I went with the women to whitewash and salt them. I moved, I worked in a kind of horror. I was beginning to realize my children were under there.

  It was almost dark when I got home. I stopped outside the house in surprise. There was music coming from it. Such longing was in it, such hunger and desolation, that I stood there crying.

  When I went in, I hurried past Mike, not wanting him to see my face. It was an old accordion he was playing, the accordion which had hung in Irish Bill's store for over a year. When he saw me, he stopped. The thing dangled awkwardly from his knee. I don't know, maybe if he had spoken to me then— But he went back to his music. I noticed it was a different song, that he played more self-consciously and made mistakes.

  That night I knew I had been living in a daze. Mist and fog had mercifully wrapped themselves around my thoughts. All the time I had been listening for laughter and voices that I would never hear again. Why had I delayed giving away the children's clothes? Why did they still hang in the closet?

  That night and for two months after I sat in the room with him. I don't know what he found to do in the daytime, but he kept away from the house. I wanted him, I longed for him, I couldn't stand the loneliness. Sometimes I counted the minutes out loud. Then he'd come.

  "Hello, Mike," I'd say.

  "Hello, Kathy." And if dinner wasn't ready, he'd go and get his accordion.

  While I scrubbed the potatoes and put them on to boil, I went over the things I was going to say to him. But when I was sitting facing him, my heart pounded and I would jump up for salt or to bring milk to the table, or maybe I'd forgotten the napkins. Anyway, what was there to say? Everything went back to four years shared and known together. Each day, even the happiest, was now an entrance into a labyrinth of pain and bitterness.

  After dinner I'd sit and listen to him play. He brooded in his music. I brooded in myself. I was alone. Mike was lost to me as surely as the children were. Night after night I listened to his

  music, hating it. Night after night I stared into the snow, hating it. I watched it melt. I watched the trappers come home. They gashed their feet and ankles and covered their heads with their blankets. The sound of mourning mingled with the sound of that damned accordion.

  Spring came. A birthday present, four months late, came from my mother. I was twenty years old. Most girls of twenty were engaged or brides. I laughed when I thought of it, because everything for me was dead. Mike looked up when I laughed, but didn't say anything.

  The accordion was driving me mad. When I was alone with it in the daytime, I wanted to smash it, break it into pieces. It had taken the children's place in his heart, and my place.

  It was another night. I watched him reach for it again. I knew I was going to stand up and scream. I didn't because they brought a man in just then. They were carrying him on a door. I washed the blood off his face before I saw his eye was almost out, just hanging. I cut the jacket and shirt off him. Mike worked over his face. And somehow Sarah was there and putting on poultices. He was Randy Nolan, new in the territory. He'd come in with the trappers. When I looked at him again, his eye was in place, and Mike was bandaging it. One of his ribs was broken off and sticking through the flesh, and across the others were long, bloody slashes.

  "Bear?" Mike asked.

  Steve Brooks slumped into a chair. "Where in hell's your whisky?"

  I got him some. He didn't bother with the glass I'd brought. When he'd had a long pull
at the bottle, he asked Mike, "Well, what do you think?"

  Mike didn't answer. He was occupied with an arm that hung at an odd angle from the socket. Steve Brooks went at the bottle again.

  "Save some," Mike said. "I want to bring him around when I've got this arm set."

  "Listen," Steve said, "I was with him, out in the canoe, shooting ducks." He paused for another drink. "Joe there was with us." He pointed at the Indian who had helped bring Nolan in. "He'll tell you what I said. I said, 'Don't shoot that damn bear.' Yeah, there was a bear on shore, a grizzly, sort of a yellow one. Reared right up when he saw us. Made a good target, except we was in a lurchy old canoe."

  He had another go at the bottle. "Where was I? Well, it don't matter. Anyway, Randy shot him and the bear rolls over dead. Don't move or nothing. So we paddle in, and Randy jumped out before we're even beached and goes racing up to where that bear is lying. Well, you can see what happened."

  I insisted that he should not be moved, and Sarah agreed with me. I welcomed that work the sick man brought me. I had something to think about, something to do. The first week he was unconscious most of the time. The second week he lay moaning. I didn't think much about whether he'd live or not. I thought more about giving him sweetened warmed milk with bread softened in it—or about making the broth nourishing. After a while Sarah let me change the poultices. It was amazing to see how they drew the angry red from the newly formed scar tissue.

  Then he began to talk to me when I came into the room. He hardly spoke above a whisper. He talked of cities, Chicago. He'd been born in Chicago.

  "Been all over," he said. "Once I been to Los Angeles."

  "Have you ever been to Boston?" I asked.

  "Sure. Got a sister living there." Before I knew what I was doing, I was telling him about my mother and Uncle Martin and my two sisters.

  "She always has a canary, and his name's always Pete, and the dogs are always Juno. And there's a room on the top floor full of flowers, and she keeps it just for—" I stopped, ashamed of myself, for I could see I'd tired him.

  But we talked again. In the morning when I brought him poached eggs, it was parks and theaters and restaurants we discussed. I described the block I'd lived on, and the house, red brick, and even the stone steps leading up to it. He told me that his sister was married to a traveling man. That she was lonesome and always writing him to come, and that she had a kid he'd never seen.

  "Randy, she calls it. Named it for me. Can you beat that?"

  He'd always been a rolling stone, he said. But he cursed the day he'd ever rolled into this devil's country, begging my pardon.

  Finally he was able to have a pillow under his head, and then two. But he didn't get his strength as he should have. The wounds were closed and no longer draining, but he lay listlessly week after week. Sometimes he'd curse the country and sometimes the bear, but usually he'd just lie there. It was plain he'd never recover the full use of his arm, but his face was not going to be disfigured as I'd thought at first. I was glad of that. It would have been a shame in such a young man.

  He thought I was wonderful to take him in and care for him. He didn't know the gap it filled for me. He didn't know I would slave night and day just to hear him tell about the concert he'd heard at Symphony Hall, and what the latest things in clothes were, and that almost everyone had a motor car now. They went awfully fast, twenty-five miles an hour. And the day would come when they wouldn't have to be cranked, either.

  I had a plan that excited me and frightened me. I led the talk back to his sister.

  That night before dinner I sent a telegram to Agnes Lentfield, Boston, U.S.A.

  The next afternoon Mike came in with a wire for Randy Nolan. I acted surprised and said that someone must have written his family.

  Mike said, "Kathy, don't you trust me any more?"

  "I don't know what you mean."

  Mike looked steadily at me.

  "Oh, for Heaven's sake, Mike, what if I did send the boy's family a wire? Someone should have sent it long ago. They've got a right to know. Why act so tragic about it?"

  He didn't say anything, and I was glad because I didn't want to quarrel. I wanted to know what was in that wire. I walked into Randy's room with it.

  "It's from your sister," I said.

  He took it from me and tried to open it, fumbling with his good hand.

  "I'll do it for you," and I tore it open. Purple block letters: RANDY DEAR STOP MUST COME WHEN FIT TO TRAVEL LOVE AGNES.

  "She wants you to come." I showed it to him.

  "Well, I don't know," he said.

  "What do you mean—you don't know? Of course you know. That's what you've been wanting."

  "Yeah," he said, "but what about her kid? Probably won't get no rest with a kid around. And, anyway, I don't know if I'm fit to go yet. It's an awful pull from here to Edmonton, to Boston."

  I persuaded him that he was fit. I reminded him that little Randy was named for him. That he was his own nephew whom he'd never seen. At last he agreed to the trip.

  "Say," he said, "how'd Agnes find out about me?"

  "Oh," I said, as casually as I could, "she was your nearest of kin. We notified her, of course."

  "But she isn't my nearest of kin. I've got a mother and—"

  "I know, but she's your favorite."

  He started to protest.

  "Look," I said, "I'm not going to hear any more out of you. Too much excitement is a bad thing."

  So I settled him for sleep and went in to have it out with Mike. He was polishing his accordion, and for once I didn't care. I poked up the fire a bit.

  "The telegram was from his sister," I said.

  He didn't say anything.

  "She lives in Boston," I went on.

  "Boston?"

  "Yes, and she wants him to come right away."

  "You mean to Boston?"

  "It would be the best thing in the world for him."

  "Would it?" He was looking at me strangely.

  "I think so," I said.

  "Why?"

  "Well, it would be good for him to get out of this country."

  "What's wrong with this country?"

  "He ought to have medical treatment. He ought to see a doctor."

  "He's doing all right."

  "Considering he's tormented by mosquitoes and insects and a hundred kinds of flies."

  "I hadn't noticed any in the house."

  "Well, they get in every time the door's opened and— Oh, what's the use, Mike? It's the country that's killing him. How can he get well here ? How can he possibly get well here with the memories this place holds?... I mean, he ought to get in the sun. You can't put a sick man in this sun. The mosquitoes would kill him. But summer's short, and then it will be winter. And you know what that means. Dark all morning and the terrible cold and the glare. Then if there's sickness, it's the weak ones that go."

  Mike looked at me for a long time. "He can't go by himself."

  "I know." I talked very fast. I didn't look at him. "I thought I'd like to take him out. I haven't been out for almost four years. It would be a grand chance. I'd take him clear through to Boston, and see Mother and—"

  Mike got up. "If you have to do this, Kathy, go ahead. God knows, maybe it's best. Maybe it will be good for you."

  "It's not on my own account," I said.

  "I know. I know. When will you go?"

  "As soon as I can."

  Mike lit his pipe.

  There wasn't much to do. I packed my clothes and the first-aid kit. Randy was able to sit up, but Mike made a stretcher for him so that the trip wouldn't tire him more than need be. This time almost the whole journey was to be made by train. No more

  waiting for the winter freeze; spring or summer you could go now, because the Edmonton and British Columbia Line was pushing deep into the Northwest. Of course they were still quite a way from Grouard.

  Mike was explaining to me that the bes
t way would be across Lesser Slave Lake to Sawarage, a hundred miles away. "There'll be a fifteen-mile portage that won't be easy with Randy on a stretcher. It might be smart to get a horse and wagon in Sawarage and make it with them."

  "Whatever you say."

  I looked at the trunk that stood open in the middle of the floor. It was packed with heavy rough shirts and men's pants, small size. I thought of myself in Boston explaining to my mother that I wore pants all the time I unpacked.

  "Well," I said, "I'd better leave a clean house for you. Sarah's going to get your meals and keep an eye on things."

  Mike didn't say anything, but spread an old map out on the table.

  I was happy, awfully happy, at getting away. And I told myself that, as I dusted and swept and scrubbed. I also told myself that Mike didn't seem to mind my going very much. He could have said more than he did.

  "How far are you going with us?" I asked.

  "I'll see you on the train, Kathy."

  "That's very sweet of you, Mike. But I don't want you to have that long trip. It isn't necessary."

  "It is necessary, it's necessary to me." He folded up the map and stuffed it into his pocket. He walked to the window and stood looking out.

  "God damn it!"

  "What?"

  "I don't want you to go."

  "But—"

  "Listen, we haven't even talked it out. You haven't told me how long you're going to stay yet, and I have a feeling—"

  "What, Mike? What's your feeling?"

  "What's the use? You're going, aren't you?"

  "Yes." What else could I say when he asked it like that?

  That was in the afternoon. He went out to make arrangements about the boat. At supper Randy joined us. There could be no talk then. And after supper Constance dropped in. She was terribly excited about my going "out." She insisted upon giving me the kerchief she wore on Sundays. It was real linen. After she'd left, Mike said we'd better turn in, that it would be a hard trip for me and I should be resting. I agreed with him.

  I brushed my hair out in front of the mirror. I took a long time over it because Mike loved to watch me. I looked at him in the mirror and saw that he was watching me now. I smiled at myself in the glass. We would say our real good-byes tonight because in the morning everyone would be there to see us off— Sarah, the Beauclaires, Old Bill, everyone. But tonight it would be like in the old days; he'd kiss me and hold me and all the silences would be broken through.