THE QUILL
We have been next-door neighbours since our children were babies, and now they're grown up and moved away. There are still dents in my hardwood floor where one of his little boys went at it with a hammer. I can still hear the sound of walker wheels clacking across that floor and see his ex-wife, Margo's, suntanned legs. I see Margo sipping coffee, kids in wheeled walkers crashing into table corners, somebody's baby hanging limp in a Jolly Jumper in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room.
I don't know what I would have done without Margo coming over to help in the morning. It got to be a regular thing that summer her eldest and my youngest were two. The children were too young to really play together yet. For the most part they ignored each other until a hand would get stepped on or a toe run over. Julie, my eldest daughter, went to a summer day camp down the street.
Most mornings my wife, Vera, left for work before the girls and I were out of bed. She would come upstairs with my coffee before heading out. She would lean over the bed, her open coat brushing the covers and smelling of cooked peas, and say, "I do this for you, Robert." Then she caught the commuter bus downtown where she worked in the main cafeteria at Energy, Mines and Resources. Vera went out with a kerchief tied around her head and under her chin, peasant style, even after I bought her a handmade hat from an artisan who works out of her home right here in the village.
Margo, as far as I know, still goes bare-headed. She is someone who knows when people are out of balance. Back then she was too young to be called the village busybody, but she knew everybody's business nevertheless. Her gossip bothered me less than it did Vera who came home to find Margo's brand of cigarettes butted out in the ashtrays. Vera said little. Before doing anything else she emptied the butts into the trash can out in the shed that used to be attached to the kitchen. She rattled the garbage can lid on and off loudly for effect. We knocked out that whole wall, it must be eight years now, to put in the solarium. I thought that it should have been on the southwest side facing Seth's property, but Vera insisted on the north. After all, what with her going off in the dark to catch that school bus every morning, what could I say?
"So, tell me about your day," she would say. I began telling her what I had heard from Margo: so-and-so was pregnant yet again, someone else had got back with her husband but it did not look hopeful, the corner store had another break-in during the night. The way Margo told it, every morsel of news had a complete and vivid life. Her whole face lit up when she told it.
Vera never came right out and said, What is she doing over here every day? It was more in the way she seemed to be losing substance. They had air-conditioning over there at EMR, but in the kitchen it was always hot. She worked from seven until two when, after clean-up, she walked five blocks to Commerce High School where she cleaned classrooms until six. Then she caught the bus home. That year it was a bad summer and fall for the humidity. Vera much preferred the winter, despite its lack of sunlight. I'm not going to say that thinking about Margo made Vera sick, although someone might pose that hypothesis.
Margo may have had a nose for other people's trouble, but she knew how to smooth down Trouble's hackles, too. That came of her nurse's training. She could look out her kitchen window and see me running down the street with Julie, late as usual for Betty Fender, who ran the day camp out of her house. Betty stood on her front porch ringing a hand bell at 8:30 as if she were the mistress of a little red school house. One time I was still in my bathrobe. I had Andrea under one arm. Julie was trying to zip up her coat and was crying, "That was the bell, Daddy. They've already started." After about the third mad dash like that, Margo began to show up. At first Julie yelled at Margo, "You're not my mother! What are you doing here, anyway?" but Margo said something like, "See, Julie, I'm wearing my jeans today. You want to be able to play outside on the climber at recess, don't you? You don't want the boys to see your underpants." Julie would laugh, this would strike her as particularly funny, and she would run upstairs to put away her good Christmas dress and leotards.
Seth was a hydro lineman. Because he was relatively junior back then, he had to be on call ten days a month which meant that he stayed with relatives in the city in order to be close to the action, whatever that action might be. Even when he tried to explain exactly what it was he did up there on those poles or in the bucket dangling on the end of a hydraulic arm, I never really understood. We would have a bad ice storm or lightning would knock out a power station, Seth would be there, doing whatever he did to turn our lights back on. I'm sure he looked at me, what I did for a living, if you could call it a living, with the same incomprehension.
He was the kind of man who came home from working all day in the sun and immediately went to work on something at home. He designed and built their back deck, turned the old ice house on his property into a workshop and garage, put bedrooms for Kenny and Jake down in the basement, and rebuilt our front porch for us. He turned that tiny house of theirs into a showplace.
Seth and I have always been cordial in that neighbourly, over-the- fence kind of way. He'd come home, see me reading manuscripts in my Cape Cod chair under the apple tree, shake his head, and lean over the fence. "Don't strain yourself there, Robert," he'd say and that would be my cue to get up and amble over to the fence. That was back in the days when I believed I could make a difference, be an important conduit for new poetic voices in this country. I still have a box full of my old letterhead: Inniskerry Press.
He was just trying to get my goat. Seth is not stupid, despite what Margo said. He knows the importance of an education. He went back to school that year to finish his grade twelve. That's after working fifty, sixty hours a week and Margo at home with the two boys and another on the way. But he loved to get his digs in. He told me about a job he was working on near this four-star lodge up in the Rideau Lakes area. He said, "We drive in there, ten in the morning, and there are all these old people sitting in wooden chairs on the lawn, not doing nothing, just reading books. Can you believe that?" he said, grinning.
I played along with the ribbing. I believed that I knew something about poetry then, that if I could get these new voices into the book stores and out reading their stuff in the coffee houses and onto the late night university radio shows, the world would change. People had only to read and listen.
Seth had a picture, an artist's drawing of himself in that classic lineman's pose at the top of a telephone pole. It was something he was proud of. When I saw it, I remarked that it was a good likeness. The artist had made the drawing, finished it, and returned to the company office to ask the identity of the worker in the picture. The painter made a living drawing hydro lineman, road crew workers, tree cutters, and people on construction sites. Seth was proud of that picture. He had hung it above the living room sofa.
He kept asking me what I thought of the picture. I do that sometimes, say something to a person and forget that I've done it and go right ahead repeating the exact same thing later. The artist had come around, found Seth when he came off shift, and held up the sketch for him to see.
"I offered him a hundred bucks for it right on the spot. I wrote him the cheque right there in the parking lot," he told me.
The first time I saw the drawing was about a week after Margo and I made love. We had taken a chance, put Andrea and Kenny down together on Andrea's bed and Jake in the playpen in the same room. We held our breath because the three of them had fallen asleep together, mid-morning, stretched out on the living room floor. We carried them upstairs in two shifts, the toddlers first and then the baby. We kept stopping and listening for them to wake up crying as they slept in the room next door.
Afterwards Margo phoned a number of times to invite Vera and me over, but I kept finding excuses. I told her we couldn't find a baby sitter. Vera would have taken the first one available, but I kept seeing something wrong: not old enough, had a boyfriend, didn't know CPR, parents lived too far away in case of emergency.
"We are going to be right next door," Vera said.
Finally Margo found a sitter for us all on her own.
"You and Vera are coming tomorrow evening for coffee and dessert. Seven-thirty. Be there," she said and then she hung up.
Kenny was still up when we walked over after supper. We rang the side doorbell and he rode his plastic tricycle smack into the door and stayed there against it while we stood there. Finally his father turned on the kitchen light.
"Get out of the way!" Seth said and pushed the boy aside with his foot. "They can't open the door with you there!"
"No!" said Kenny. "I want to do it!" and he began to scream.
Their kitchen was filled with the smell of boiled coffee. A dented aluminum percolator was going like a geyser on the stove. We went into the living room and sat down together, the four of us.
"Margo tells me you got some kind of crap - what was that?"
"Chapbook," she said.
"Ya, chapbook in the works. What is that exactly?"
I told him that it was a short limited edition poetry book by a local artist.
"I'll buy one. I want the first one," he said, "signed by the author."
Then he stood up and crossed the room to where Vera and I were sitting on the couch. He leaned in between us. We had to twist around to see what he was pointing at.
"This here isn't a copy. It's the original. Here's the artist's signature in the corner. What do you think about that, Robert. I only just bought it today."
I told him it was a fair likeness.
"It's the first time I ever seen a picture of myself doing what I do. It's kind of strange to think that's me. What do you think of the quality?"
I didn't know what to say. It was one step up from a caricature, hastily composed, capturing enough of Seth's facial features and accomplishing the verisimilitude of the scene with enough skill to render it recognizable. I wanted to say that a hundred dollars was about seventy-five more than the artist had expected to get off him. I told him it would probably be worth something someday.
"Someday? Shit, it's worth something right now. To me." He stepped back. We were still cranked around in our seats and looking up at the picture. Then he said, "I heard about this painter who was painting a picture, a view of a city from his window, oh, it had to be a hundred years ago. When he finished he noticed something strange that he had not seen before. Something was going on in one of the windows of the building across the way, not for real but in his painting. He couldn't quite make out what, so he got out a magnifying glass. Now he could see what it was. There was a man there with his hands around a woman's throat. He couldn't for the life of him remember putting that in. Sure enough, the next day a woman's body is found exactly where he had painted her dying. Using his tiny likeness, the police were able to catch the killer."
Margo excused herself to put Kenny to bed. Vera started flipping through a People magazine that had been sitting on the lamp table beside her. I exclaimed over Seth's story. He continued to stand there peering into his likeness.
"You wouldn't believe some of the things I see when I'm up there."
"I can imagine," I said.
"No, you can't. We're working in the west end this one morning across from a church. I'm in the bucket, cutting some trees back from the line. There I am giving this big old chestnut a trim, branches and leaves dropping all over the place, when all of a sudden I'm looking directly into a bedroom window about as far away as from me to you. The curtains are wide open and all the lights are on even though it's broad daylight. This woman is there doing the vacuuming stark naked! She gives me a wave. I wave back. Big smile from her, big smile back at her. Then she's gone into another room. The only thing she had on was one of those kerchiefs on her head. You know, like the kind you wear, there, Vera."
Vera looked up from her magazine and was about to say something when Margo reappeared.
"Well, we'll see how long he lasts. Kenny hates to miss a party. Anyone for coffee? Robert?"
I will drink coffee any place, any time, Margo knew that about me. Vera said that she had to get up early and asked for a glass of milk instead.
"Let me liven that up for you," said Seth. "Let me splash some Bailey's in there. Dave, talk to your wife here. We didn't invite you guys over here to drink milk."
Vera insisted that it was what she wanted. She gave me a look over the top of her glasses. I asked Seth how his workshop was coming along.
"I'm widening the door," he said. "I want it big enough for the boat to get through."
"He knows as much about boats as he does about poetry," said Margo.
That year Seth took his first night course in English toward his diploma and I offered to tutor him. I suggested it to Margo. I felt I should do this for Seth.
She said, "Don't waste your time. He tried to get his English three times in a row and flunked out each time. And he went to every class. He was actually trying!"
I argued that people learn in different ways and at different times of their lives. A person who does not want to learn something will not. I said that Seth had a reason now to gain his diploma. Without it he would never get a promotion. I told her this.
She said, "You don't know Seth. He doesn't have what it takes."
It was making her angry to think about her husband sitting at a school room desk again, learning how to write a strong thesis statement for an essay.
Vera took sick that fall. I wanted her to check into the hospital. She had no energy, was barely able to walk into the clinic those times I brought her back. I demanded they do something. She had dizzy spells. It was probably the flu, the doctor said. "Take her home, keep her fluids up, there's nothing else you can do." When I insisted, they did blood work. When I demanded more, they ran a brain scan. Nothing showed up. Finally the doctor said that Vera had some kind of atypical viral infection. She would just have to stay in bed and give her body time to fight it.
Vera got a week's paid sick leave from the school board but nothing from the caterers. I had just used up the last of my grant printing a book of poems and woodcut drawings by a woman who lived down the street from us in the local retirement home. At eighty-four she held the record for the most number of poems published in literary magazines. Vera wanted to get a visiting nurse, but we couldn't afford it. I told her that I would nurse her. This upset her. I wasn't to interrupt my work, she said.
Looking back on it, I wonder what it was all for. Vera recovered. The doctors never could tell her what exactly she had. She went on to buy into the catering business when it was in trouble. She saw her chance when the company started to go under. It was back when civil servants had money and were being lured out to fancy restaurants for lunch. She was managing the kitchen at EMR then. She had good ideas. She revised the menus and preparation techniques, copying what she was seeing elsewhere: salad bars, microwaved burgers and pizzas, made-to-order deli sandwiches. Now she owns a half interest.
We've made out all right, the two of us. We're still here. We bought this house that we used to rent, put in new windows, turned the attic into an office for me. I publish a business monthly out of that office now. It pays for itself. There was no looking ahead to this time, though, not when Vera was sick and we were out of money. She was the one who suggested Margo.
"Ask her. She will do this for us, surely," Vera said. "Neighbours help each other in these ways."
Margo drove into the city Tuesdays and Thursdays where she worked as a geriatric ward nurse. She had to be there for four in the afternoon and didn't return before midnight. When Seth had to work late those days, Margo left the boys with me. It only made four kids, but at that time of the day, when they were falling all over each other cranky and hungry, they seemed like a gang of ten. Julie wasn't old enough then to be much of an activities director. It was the longest stretch, three hours sometimes, until Seth pulled in next door. He'd arrive, park his truck, step inside long enough to change his clothes and down a stiff shot which I could not begrudge him, and then walk over here. I'd open the door and he'd look at me only briefly, just a glance. He'd apologize for the continuing inconvenience. His way was to tell me in detail the reason why he was late, details I had neither the technical knowledge nor the desire to understand. Then, his arms full of children, he trudged home.
Vera said, "Call Margo. Ask her if she will come over and fix me lunch. It's the only meal I feel like eating. Two, three hours at the most. Just to fix me a little lunch, help me bathe so that you won't be interrupted, Robert, in your work. I think it's the least she can do to repay you for caring for her little guys when Seth is late. Go ahead. You ask her. That's the way we'll do it."
And that was the way we did it. Of course it didn't free any time for me. There was still Andrea to care for. She wasn't old enough yet for Betty Fender's. And when Margo came over from ten until after lunch, there were her two to tend to and feed. Vera knew this.
There was more to caring for Vera than I thought. I asked her, "Why don't you just check yourself into a hospital, meet this thing head on?" But she wouldn't hear of it.
Margo arrived wearing her uniform, which was beginning to get tight on her around the middle. I said wearing it was not necessary, but she insisted. We had coffee, although it was not the way it had been during the summer. We talked about Vera, how she was that day, as if I were the night shift briefing my replacement. It was awkward. We spoke softly, avoiding eye contact. Our conversation was continually being interrupted by some catastrophe involving the children and Margo would jump up from the kitchen table. This had been our time.
The tree branches were bare. I knew that I should be raking the leaves up off the driveway. Our landlord would be complaining about it not being done yet. When the leaves decomposed, the acids ate away at the asphalt. This was the time of year we had to close the windows of the big old house and run the dehumidifier so that the glass would not stream with condensation. My books were not being picked up by any of my regular stores. "The last one didn't sell," they said. I asked if they would continue to display them on spec. "Have you considered switching your business to mail order?" they suggested.
Although we hadn't said anything about weekends, Margo came over anyway. It was a Saturday. The children went up into the attic to play. Margo said that she'd already had coffee and so I put on my jacket and stepped out into the backyard. I could hear Seth hammering next door. My intention was to get at the raking. I did not know where to begin.
I looked over at movement in the downstairs bathroom window. The curtains were open. Margo was helping Vera into her bath. Vera was naked and trembling. She held both her arms up shoulder high, her elbows bent. Margo had hold of one arm and was steadying her as Vera lifted a leg into the tub. Margo was all business, all nurse.
I went next door, walked down the gravel drive to Seth's workshop and stepped inside. He had an oil stove running. The inside of the structure, a two-storey barn that used to store blocks of ice cut from the river, was covered in pink fibreglass insulation. A heavy-duty extension cord light, the kind encased in wire mesh on one side and metal plate on the other, hung from a nail in an overhead rafter.
"I'll have to go to work and raise these rafters another ten feet before I can get that boat in here," he said.
I asked him if he had bought the vessel yet. He said no, but he had his eye on a couple of beauties.
"These people are never satisfied with what they got," he said. "Every two years they have to trade up for more horsepower, more room, radar, sonar, satellite dish, you name it. Everybody's looking to sell."
He wanted a wooden boat, one that he could return to its original high polish. If wood was good enough for the Vikings, he said, it was good enough for him.
He was standing on a rafter where he was nailing particle board over top of the insulation that was encased in clear plastic. He said that there was an extra hammer on the bench next to where I was standing. I climbed up beside him. Together we finished one whole wall of the room, me holding the boards in place, Seth hammering them into the vertical supports with never more than three blows of the hammer per nail. He took full loose swings from the shoulder as if he knew he would never miss, even if he closed his eyes.
He said, "I got my first assignment back, did I tell you? Eight and a half out of ten. Two hundred words explaining how to do something, you know, the steps you'd take. Well, shit, I have to do that all the time, tell somebody, some new guy on probation, how to hook up a live line without getting himself fried. All I did was write it down the way I would have said it. The teacher gave us suggestions: how to bake a cake, how to program a VCR, how to replace the bearings in a bicycle hub. I decided to stick with what I knew. You know that's the first A I ever got in school?"
He banged in two more nails and then we moved over to the next rafter. He is not a big man, scrawny almost. He looks about the same way he did when we first met twenty years ago. He moves with a sense of purpose and economy, one of those people who knows where his body is all the time. I stayed until Margo came back after making lunch for Vera and the kids. I simply lost track of the time, lost the sense of where I was. She came in, found us working up there on the back wall, and when she spoke it jolted me the same as if I'd touched a live wire.
"You're out of cheese, Robert," she said and then she walked back up the driveway and into her own house.
Vera got stronger every day. Soon she was well enough to catch the commuter bus again into work. Now that the days had shortened again, she left in darkness and returned in darkness. Things evened themselves out. The children began to get themselves dressed in the morning. Betty Fender took Andrea in, even though she was just out of diapers and two years younger than the others, giving me three mornings a week to read poetry, compose rejection letters that were constructive without being devastating, and search for new funds.
After Vera recovered, Margo stopped coming over. I called her a few times to invite her for coffee, nothing more, but there was always some reason. Once, when I knew Vera was asleep, I got up and put my coat on over my pyjamas, my boots over bare feet, and waited outside on the front porch for Margo to come home from her shift at the hospital. I went back inside to get a hat and gloves. It was a wonder Vera didn't wake up, what with me opening and closing doors and pacing across the creaky boards of the porch.
We replaced that entire porch a year after we bought the house and built the addition out back. Seth chose the lumber and directed the work. It was the kind of thing he loved to do and it was a distraction for him so soon after Margo's leaving him. He came over every day after work, not even changing his clothes, and started in. Vera stopped cooking a regular sit-down supper while the work was going on and took to trying out her new fast-but-healthy line of dishes on us. They were all types of meals we could eat while we worked. Long after I would be ready to pack it in for the night, Seth would still be at it, sometimes until well after dark.
If he saw me waiting, outside on my porch that cold night, for his wife to come home, he never said anything. She pulled in and turned off her headlights. As she was getting out of the car, she saw me heading across the brittle grass of our front lawn. There was nowhere to go, so we got into her car and drove down to the Community Center parking lot, which was the place where Vera caught her bus in the morning and where it dropped her off at night. It was where my daughters took figure skating lessons and where her sons learned how to stick-handle a puck. It was the place where the whole town gathered to listen to bluegrass and country and western bands and where there was enough open space to set off fireworks safely.
She parked, but kept the engine and the heater running.
"It was a hard night, Robert," she said. "I'm really tired."
"I know," I said. "I woke up and realized that this was the time you usually got home."
"If you want to know why I haven't been coming over, it's because I've been making plans." Then she said, "He keeps talking about this boat, as if it's going to solve everything, but I've never even seen a picture of one. He's never going to buy one. He practically brought the roof down on himself trying to raise the rafters. There's no boat. There's never going to be any boat."
I said, "I love you. I'm going...I'm going to ask Vera..."
"Don't," she said. "Don't say anything. I'm sorry, Robert. I like you, but you don't figure in my plans. I need someone who doesn't have to ask anyone for anything."
She drove me home. After Christmas she took the boys and moved in with her parents, but that arrangement didn't last long. If it had been her telling the story about someone else, she would have belaboured the point that moving back into your parents' house is like going to your high school reunion. It doesn't take long before you run out of nice things to say. Apparently the little boys drove Margo's father, who was used to his peace and quiet, to the point of distraction. He wrote her a cheque, enough to cover her stay in a motel for a week. Then she was on her own.
Margo made out all right, too, in the end. She married a widowed doctor from the hospital where she worked. They live together with her three sons now, Kenny, Jake and Shamus, and the doctor's daughter in a big place on the river. For the longest time Seth had the boys trailing around after him on weekends. Margo's car would pull into the driveway to let them out. I never saw her get out herself.
The other day Seth brought his boat home. Traffic on Main Street was jammed for the better part of an hour as he tried to figure out how he was going to swing the monster into his narrow drive without taking a corner of the house off. From up and down the street, men came out of their houses, men whom I knew only in passing. They got up from their recliners, up from their beer and their ball game, and came out into the street to help Seth park his boat. Some of them took to directing traffic, there being just enough room at intervals for one line of cars to squeeze past the trailer. Others paced across the driveway entrance making eyeball estimates of the space required for the manoeuvre. They agreed, after repeated attempts on Seth's part to back the trailer in, that part of the fence between the two properties would have to be removed temporarily. Tools were fetched. The corner post, a thick-hewn log placed there by our old landlord, was dug up and removed. Then they rolled the wire fencing back and the slow inching, forward and back, began again. Men yelled, "Whoa! Watch 'er, there. Go back! Try her again, Seth-boy. Crank the wheel a little sharper this time." Curious people out walking stopped on the sidewalk to watch the event.
I was watching from the bedroom window. Vera was on the phone with Julie, who was working in another city for the summer and wasn't sure she wanted to go back to school. She wanted to know what we thought of her coming back to live with us for a while. After she hung up, Vera came over to the window beside me.
"You shouldn't stare out the window at them, Robert. If you want to go out to help, you should go out to help."
I said, "He's doing it. After all these years of talking about it."
"Go down and help if you want to," she said.
"I think I will, if that's all right with you."
"You don't need my permission to do anything," she said. "You never have."
"It will only be for a while," I said.
Once he had the truck and trailer aligned in the driveway, it was smooth sailing. The door of the garage, if you can believe it, was too low, out by less than the span of a hand but enough to halt the boat outside its intended shelter. There were five men standing around when I arrived, the rest of them having drifted back home. I helped a man replace Seth's fence post, the two of us stomping the dirt back down around it with our boots. We decided to let Seth reattach the wire fencing himself and walked back to where the men were standing under the bow of the boat. Seth was saying something. I heard my name clearly and I'm pretty sure I heard Margo's. Then the group began to laugh knowingly. When they saw me they stopped. Soon, after excusing themselves one by one, they left Seth and me alone.
He dragged some tarpaulins over top of the boat and secured them with rope. He knew what he was doing. I stood there watching. Finally he said, "You've been a good neighbour, Robert. It's a chance you take moving into a new place. You can choose the house you buy, but you got no control over your neighbours. You're not the kind of man I'd go drink a beer with, but it's given me peace of mind to know you were here. You and Vera are good people."
I thanked him. There wasn't much else I could do to help. I made a joke about Noah and the flood. His response was to explain how he was going to build the temporary shelter, a series of wooden ribs running the length of the boat and covered by heavy plastic sheeting. It would be enough to keep the rain and the leaves off. Then, step by step, in minute detail, he explained how he was going to restore his boat. He said this to me even though I had not asked him to. He explained it with such thoroughness and with such a sense of finality, I knew that once he had finished there would be nothing else to say. We understood each other. We were neighbours. There was nothing else.
