Laid To Rest

That spring Alan got a job on a harbor tugboat as a deckhand. Occasionally the boat went out of port for a towing job down the coast but for the most part it was like working in an office or a factory, starting at eight in the morning and back home by five. He loved it. He hated being penned up inside and this job meant being on deck all day, painting, cleaning, installing new equipment, working the lines, and other tasks assigned to him by the bo’sun.

Home was a small apartment in a building in the old downtown. Once it had been a single family dwelling, a very large one, but some years ago it had been broken up into apartments and rented out to people much like himself, workmen of various descriptions and women office workers. The place was owned by a woman in her seventies, a Mrs. Green, a widow. She lived in the apartment at the very front on the first floor, one which took up half of that floor and was thus much more spacious than any of the others.

Mrs. Green was a church going lady, an Anglican, and dead against late hours, drinking and fornication. She made her dislikes well known when Alan had first come to look at the apartment but they didn’t bother him for he was a nondrinker, kept hours as regular as clockwork and had a girlfriend with a house of her own where he slept every Friday and Saturday night. Mrs. Green didn’t mind fornication outside of her own premises; it was the inside kind that caused her distress. Alan appreciated the old lady’s strictness, for the house was a quiet one and he had to be up early in the morning five days a week. He had one of the smaller apartments sharing the first floor with Mrs. Green and was thus comfortably near the center of order, authority and proper living.

Alan knew some of the other tenants by sight, seeing them coming and going in the corridors or up the front steps but he never got to know any in a personal way. Most were middle aged, settled in their ways and not looking for new adventures, new acquaintances. This suited Alan fine. Although younger than most, he shared their quiet habits. The five nights a week he spent in the apartment, he showered, made and ate supper and read for some hours before going to bed early. Ocassionally he went over to his girlfriend’s during the week but his was unusual. She had a high powered, stressful job which didn’t leave her much energy for anyone else during the week.

The house was situated on a large lot next to a graveyard. Alan’s window looked out over the graveyard, something many might find discomforting but not Alan. He was not superstitious and the graveyard, with its well tended green grass, its aging, weathered stones and its yew trees was delightful to look out over, especially in the evenings when the sun was going down. It was an Anglican establishment and, since its history went back more than two centuries, mostly full. There were still a few empty spots, usually waiting for the widow or widower of an already deceased spouse. Mrs. Green’s husband was buried there and she would be joining him when she died. “I don’t have to go very far,” she joked when she told him this. Although on the outside, a strict and severe lady, Mrs, Green had a very good sense of humor, wry and self deprecating. Over the spring and summer months, spending fifteen minutes with her now and then, sometimes in the backyard where he went to read outside, sometimes in her apartment when he paid the rent, Alan developed an appreciation, even an affection for the old lady. She was a woman of character, intelligence and depth.

Things went along just fine through the spring and summer and into early fall until one night, in mid September, Alan was woken by a loud scream coming from inside Mrs. Green’s apartment, a long piercing scream which could only come from a mind and body gripped in a vice of pure terror. Alan leaped out of bed, threw on his bathrobe and rushed into the corridor. When he came to Mrs. Green’s door, some twenty feet down from his own, he knocked. No answer. He knocked again. He thought he heard the sound of movement through the door but couldn’t be sure. He knocked once more and when there was no answer went back to apartment. The scream didn’t seem to disturb any of the other tenants, although why was a mystery to Alan. His own phrase for the scream was one of his grandmother’s, that it would have woken the dead. No one else came out into the corridor and he could hear no sounds inside any of the other apartments. He began to think that the scream was from a nightmare of his own and he had confused it with outside reality. But he was a resilient young man and tired after working hard all day so he went back to sleep almost right away and slept soundly until his alarm clock woke him at his usual hour the next morning.

Alan had no intentions of bringing the scream up with Mrs. Green. He figured that she had a nightmare and hollered out in her distress and would be mortally embarrassed to have a tenant bring this up in conversation. She would no doubt think it a personal affair. He couldn’t have been more surprised when, two weeks later, in her apartment paying his rent, the old lady brought it up herself.

“I suppose it was you who knocked on the door,” she said.

“Well, yes, it was,” replied Alan.

“I must apologize. He was still there and he forbade me to go to the door.”

“Who was still there?”

“Albert. My husband.”

“I thought you told me he was dead and buried.”

“Well, yes he is. I call him Albert, out of habit, but it would be more accurate to call him Albert’s ghost.”

“His ghost?”

“Yes. But perhaps you don’t believe in ghosts?”

“I don’t believe or disbelieve in them. I have read some things about them but have never seen one.”

“One is supposed to be loyal to one’s husband, alive or dead, but there is a limit to all principles of conduct. After all they are meant to be guidelines, not absolutes. Wouldn’t you agree, Mr.Gill?”

“I suppose there is, yes.”

“Exactly. Albert died ten years ago, at the age of sixty-three. It was surprising to me and to anyone else who knew him, that he lasted that long. He drank. He took drugs. He was arrested many times for brawling in bars. He frequented houses of prostitution where he paid large sums of money for deviant pleasures. Often, on one of his sprees, he would be gone for months, and occasionally he disappeared for half a year. He worked as a lawyer until the age of forty when he found the practice of his profession interfered with his dissipations. From then on his source of income was browbeating money from me and the odd shady scheme he lent the ever dwindling authority of his legal reputation. Fortunately, I had some money of my own and when I saw the lay of the land clearly, I converted the house to apartments. What was left I put into an iron clad annuity which could not be broken. If it wasn’t for that, ten years after we married, I would have been destitute, on the street in fact. Even then, over the next twenty years or so, he succeeded in extorting money from me with tears, threats and promises of reform. He could be very charming if it was in his self interest. Thwarted he was a monster. Once he broke my arm, another time my wrist and jaw. Twice he battered down the door to my apartment and I was forced to call the police and have him taken away. These events were occasioned by my refusing to borrow money for him. The house was from my family and the deed was in my name. In the end, five years before he died, I had a court order issued against him. Then, several months before he died, the hospital phoned.”

Here, Mrs. Green lifted her cup from the table and had a drink of tea. She set down the cup, looked for a moment out the window where there was bright sunshine playing in the leaves of an oak which partially blocked the view, and then, bringing her eyes back to her cup, resumed.

“He was dying, of course. A ruined liver, kidney disease, a failing pancreas and a number of other problems, each one, if taken alone, enough to kill him. They wanted me to take him home, partly because he claimed the right to die at home but also, I think, because he was a very trying patient. As weak as he was his temper had not abated. He swore vehemently almost with every breath. He threw things. He shouted and screamed. It was as if he was possessed by a devil. Being the dutiful wife I took him in. What a mistake! From the day the attendants wheeled him in the door he never stopped his torrent of abuse. He claimed it was I who had ruined his life. I was a mean, selfish, coldhearted bitch. My coldness, my nastiness had driven him to drugs. My frigidity had driven him into the arms of other women. My meanness with money had destroyed his chances of redeeming and reforming himself. And so on and so on. It only stopped when I gave him an injection and he went off into the world of nod. Did you know that in some cases of palliative care they use heroin? He was a terrible mess and it was the only thing which gave him any relief. When they sent him home they told me he had six months but he lasted only three. At the end he couldn’t swallow, he couldn’t void his bowels, he was blind and he could barely breath.”

Again she paused, this time looking me directly in the eye. “I’m sorry Mr. Gill. I did not plan to unload all this on you but you have a sympathetic presence and it has triggered a great need to unburden myself. I have friends, mostly women my own age at the church. But I cannot talk to them about these things. They would be scandalized and made truly miserable if I spoke to them of these things.”

“Mrs. Green, it’s OK. If it is of use to you to tell me all this then go ahead.”

She took another drink of tea and began again.

“At the end it was horrible. He was either so sedated he was like a man already dead, or raging like a madman. Whenever he was awake he followed me around the room with his head, for although he was blind, he used his head as a sightless directional device. His eyelids were open and his corneas a pale yellow laced with the tiniest spiderweb traces of red. He told me that his death would not be the end. He told me he would be back to torment me just as I had tormented him. He would be buried only next door he said. He would come wrapped in linen cloths like Lazarus, stinking of the corruption of the grave. I would be forced to remember, forced to relive the injustices I had visited upon him, the coldness, the meanness, the humanity which I had held back from him. In a queer reversal, he told me, he, a dead man risen from his grave, would make me, a living woman, his incubus. All this was so horrible I sometimes wonder now where I found the strength to go on bathing him, changing his sheets, giving him his drugs. But somehow I did.”

“On the day he died, early in the morning, after giving him his shot, I went down the back stairs into the yard and sat on the lawnchair beside the big flowerbed. The sun had yet to climb above the trees in the east and the streets beyond the house and the yard were yet unburdened with the traffic carrying people to work. A few birds were singing in the leaves. There was a slight breeze coming from the west, a warm breeze, for it would be another hot day in a succession of hot days. Suddenly a decision which had been mulling about in my mind for some days, was made. I got up from the chair, went back up into the apartment and, filling the syringe with four times the usual dosage, injected the whole thing into a vein in his leg. He was dead in ten minutes.”

This was so stunning to Alan that he didn’t know what to say.

“The doctor came to pronounce him dead in the late morning and the funeral people picked him up early in the afternoon. Of course in a case like Albert’s there is no autopsy so there was no chance of the immediate cause of his death being discovered. Even if there had been I suppose they would have covered it up. What would be the point? Whether he died on Tuesday of an overdose or on Wednesday of heart failure would not have been a matter of real interest to anyone.”

“Probably you did the man a favor Mrs. Green. From what you say any extra time he might have had would have been spent in raging and beastliness. What would have been the point of that?”

“It’s not so much that, Mr. Gill. It’s the motivation which sometimes bothers me. I realize that Albert had blocked himself off from any possibility of redemption. Certainly in his last five years, while it may have been a theoretical possibility, it was not a practical one. What concerns me about my actions on that day is motivation. I am afraid I must admit that I wanted to kill him, that I enjoyed killing him and that when he was gone I was glad in a deep and enduring way. I am still glad that he is dead. And then, of course, there is this other thing, these visitations.”

“I am not a priest or an expert in ethics, Mrs. Green, but it seems to me that your wanting to kill this man after all the suffering and abuse he gave you would be quite natural. And, as well, I would say that your killing him was not the usual kind of killing. After all he would have been dead in a few days even if you had done nothing. It might be more accurate to say that you expedited his death rather than caused it. From what I know of Christian ethics, if there had been some possibility of his healing, of his delivering his soul to God, before his death, then taking away those last few hours would have been a great sin. But there was no possibility of that and therefore no sin.”

“And the motivation?”

“Was human weakness, perhaps, but surely the Christian God forgives human weakness if the sinner asks for forgiveness.”

“Yes. I have asked but so far I don’t feel I have been forgiven. But then they say one must continue asking, which I do. They also say that one does not necessarily feel the forgiveness in an emotional way, as if it were a purging or an epiphany.”

“Does the ghost know you gave him an overdose?”

“No, thank God.”

“What does he want?”

“For me to come to the grave with him.”

“God.”

“He comes once or twice a month. I wake as soon as he comes up from the grave and I can hear him walking in that terrible, stumbling way, along the gravel path of the cemetery. His flesh is half eaten away and his bones literally rattle and grind against one another. His eye sockets are a swarm of worms and his skull mostly exposed. He brings with him a horrible stench and a cold so extreme that even in the midst of the summer it is as if a sudden stream of artic air had been released into the room. He must be incorporeal for he comes through the door as if it were merely a screen of molecules and yet he gives the impression of solid physical presence. He has about him the energy of a keen and abiding hatred, a hatred which began in life and now has gone beyond the grave.”

“Does he speak?”

“No and I thank God for that. If he spoke I would go out of my mind. But he gestures. He wants me to come with him back to his grave. He makes the same gestures over and over again like he was an automaton or a robot. Sometimes he reaches out to grasp my hand as if to drag me off with him. But I pull back out of the way to avoid him. This pulling back confuses him. He stumbles about and then retreats to the other side of the room. He stays sometimes an hour, sometimes two, but never longer. He raises his arms in a kind of rage and stumbles about violently before he goes. After this terrible dance he turns about suddenly and goes back through the door.”

“I am not experienced in these things, Mrs. Green, but if you wish I would be willing to come sit with you when he next comes. You say you wake when he rises from the grave. How long is there between then and when he comes through the door?”

“Perhaps five minutes.”

“If you put your phone on speed dial and push the button as soon as you hear him, then I should have time to come over and be there when he comes.”

“You are not afraid?”

“I might be afraid when he comes, Mrs. Green, but I’m not afraid now. After all I have no history with him. Some of the books say that the dead have no power unless we give it to them. I wonder if that is true?”

“It may be. If I move away from him it confuses and agitates him. So maybe it is true.”

“Do you want me to come then?”

“Yes.”

“Fine.” Alan programmed his number into Mrs. Green’s phone so that when she pushed the number one his number automatically dialed. From that night on he slept with his own phone on the bedside table a few inches away from his ear.

There was no phone call for nearly three weeks and Alan began to wonder if the whole thing had not resolved itself. Perhaps Albert’s energy had run out in some way and he was now condemned to lie in his grave. During this time he didn’t meet Mrs. Green in the corridor or in the back yard so had no opportunity of speaking with her. He thought a few times of knocking on her door but decided against it. If she was comfortable simply waiting so was he.

In October his girlfriend wanted to take a long weekend holiday but he said no. Already he had cut down his sleepovers at her house to Saturday night and his refusal to go away with her for three days made her very angry. He told her a little of his reason why but she was not sympathetic. She thought him morbid and the ‘elderly lady’ whom he spoke about to be a deranged crackpot. She wondered aloud whether this ‘elderly lady’ might not in truth be much younger, in short a hot little number he was seeing on the side. She became so angry that she threw him out of the house which distressed him but not too much. She had an impulsive and fiery nature but would soon get over it. Meanwhile he could be at home, even weekend nights, ready for when and if Albert came.

It happened on a Friday night, almost a month after Albert had last come to visit. When the phone rang the illuminated clock on the bedside table said three thirty-six. Mrs. Green’s voice was very steady, very controlled, but beneath there was an undercurrent of tension. He said, “I’ll be there in two minutes.”

Alan pulled on a T shirt and a pair of jeans. He plunged his feet into an old pair of cowboy boots. This took a few seconds longer than donning his bathrobe but he wanted to meet Albert in clothes which gave him some freedom of movement. When he reached Mrs. Green’s door it was ajar. He walked into her apartment and closed the door behind him.

Mrs. Green was seated on a stuffed chair in the living room. There was another, of exactly the same design, beside her and she gestured her intention that he sit in it. He sat. They looked at one another directly in the eye but said nothing. They both stared off toward the door, waiting.

Mrs. Green’s guess about the timing was very accurate. Two minutes after Alan sat in the chair beside her he heard something come along the corridor. When it came through the door the hair on the back of his neck stood up like porcupine quills. His mouth opened in astonishment.

First came a skeletal hand almost devoid of flesh but not totally. There were still hanging from it a few shreds of rotted sinew and bits of gristle half covered two of the finger joints. Then came a ribcage carrying within it a mass of foul corruption spreading before it a stench so powerful it was like a chemical spray or mist. Along with it came a dropping of the temperature so extreme it was as if the room had suddenly been dropped into the depths of a polar sea. Then the rest of the figure stepped into the room and the full horror of a half rotted body risen from its grave stood before them. The corruption in its ribcage was a seething mass of worms. Shreds of flesh hung here and there as if it had been raked by a giant metal comb. Lank hair hung from a scalp which had slipped off its center and now was slumped onto the side of a bare skull. When it came fully through the door the figure stopped and moved its head around to get its bearings. After a few moments of this it brought its maggot filled eyes to a point between Mrs. Green and Alan, and slowly, stumbled toward them.

Alan was terrified. Never in his life had he ever imagined that he would see such a thing. It was only with a great effort that he stopped himself from voiding his bowels and bladder. His stomach was as if someone had pierced it with a giant icicle. He stopped the violent shaking of his hands by placing them on the arm of the chair and grasping with all his strength. Mrs. Green brought both hands up to her mouth and began to softly moan. In a surprisingly low, quiet voice Alan said to her, “No.’ and she stopped. Then he rose from his chair and moved toward the figure.

When he was almost in contact with it, the figure grew, or at least it seemed to Alan that it did, less substantial. Still he continued on not so much in the hope of grasping it physically and conquering it, but rather making an attempt to confront its unreality. He walked through it. There was a sensation of even more intense cold and then, thinking himself through, he turned around. His movement had broken the figure up into hundreds of parts. They swam in the air like shredded pieces of tissue might swim in water. Some were recognizable segments, a section of teeth here, a knee joint there; others were mere indistinguishable flotsam. He walked through again, then again and then again, not violently, not aggressively, but as calmly as he could muster in the circumstances. Soon there were only a few shreds of mist and then even these disappeared into nothingness. The room returned to its normal temperature. The stench turned suddenly, as if a magician had snapped his fingers to command it, into a faint smell of flowers - lilacs, roses, and even the slightest touch of the rich smell of blooming lilies.

Sunday morning Alan and Mrs.Green attended the eleven o’clock service at the Cathedral, a short walk away from the house. Here in the cool stone interior they listened to the drone of the liturgy and the clear crystal notes of a young people’s choir. Mrs. Green stepped forward to receive the Eucharist, but Alan, neither a Christian nor of the Anglican communion, remained in his seat. The congregation was mostly elderly but there was a sprinkling of the middle aged and even the odd person under thirty. After the Eucharist came more prayers and then the final hymn. Although not theologically inclined, Alan loved the old hymns, and he and Mrs. Green gave out a robust version of ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, she in a quavering soprano, he in a stentorian Russian baritone. They shook the Vicar’s hand on the way out of the church and walked down the steps into the bright sunshine.

But Church was not the only place they went that morning. After walking the length of the tree lined street leading from the Cathedral, they turned left and walked two blocks until they came to a restaurant hidden behind a series of tall lilac bushes. When they entered the front door Alan spied his girlfriend at the very back, sitting in a booth. They joined her there.

Although suspicious and inclined toward conspiracy theories, Alan’s girlfriend had no choice but to accept the reality of Mrs. Green, a formidable lady who, accessing the situation in one quick, intuitive glance, was all charm, kindness and delightful conversation. The young woman was won over completely by this grandmotherly person who, before the meal was ended, invited her for morning tea and a tete a tete at her apartment the following Saturday. Mrs. Green left for home right after the meal by taxi, insisting there was no need for the young people to accompany her.

After several cups of coffee and conversation, Alan and his girlfriend left the restaurant and walked to her house, hand in hand.

Some blocks over, towered over by oaks and shaded by yew trees, the graves in the old cemetery lay quiet beneath their stone markers. In one corner, up against the wrought iron fence which keeps out the street and strolling pedestrians, was a granite stone bearing an inscription on only one half of its polished surface. Beneath it lie the bones of Albert Green, which, after much madness, violence, meanness, suffering and sorrow, have finally come to their eternal rest.

Willi was one of those men whose faces look as though they were hewn from a chunk of wood with a dull axe. Below his dark curling hair, graying at the tips, his forehead hung like a great cliff over eye sockets so deep that in their shadows his eyes were almost hidden from view. His nose was large and many angled. His jaw was massive with a slight over bite. His ears were protruding and gigantic. His head was long and pear shaped and perched atop a small tough body which could work for sixteen hours in a day with no greater toll than a pleasant, languid weariness as he climbed into bed in the evening.

Willi was born on a farm outside a small town in a part of the country filled with pothole lakes and marshes; a flat place where first the pressure of an ancient lake and then the scraping retreat of glaciers removed all hills and prominences. He was the oldest of twelve siblings. The farm was dairy. The family sold some of the milk as milk but most they turned into cheese. This was where they really made their money. Willi’s mother’s cheese, for it was she who was the master cheese maker, was exceptional and they could sell as much as they could make and more. Nobody gets rich from making cheese, especially if they have twelve children, but the family’s operation brought in enough to make ends meet and, with good money management, there was a little left over. In their humble, hard working community, where many had far less, they were considered mildly prosperous.

When Willi was a teenager and a young man he did not go out with girls. He saw himself as a kind of troglodyte, and what girl would be interested in stepping out with a troglodyte? He attended school graduation with a friend of Evelyn’s, his oldest sister, but this was an arranged affair and, at least for Willi, truly painful. Instead, after leaving school, he threw himself into his work. Summers he worked the gravel pit for cash and winters he milked cows and made cheese. By the time he was thirty-five he had saved enough to buy a farm down the road from his parents. His father gave him ten cows and his mother some old cheese making equipment and he went into cheese making. Since he was intelligent and hard working he did very well. Even his mother, whose standards were high, said that Willi’s cheese was as good if not better than her own. Willi was not cut out for selling so he marketed his cheese through his parents. His father was the salesman, taking a cooler truck to the neighboring towns every Saturday excepting the Saturday of Christmas week. By the time he was forty- three Willi’s farm was paid for, he had a new, modern barn, and he had fifty cows, Holsteins, great producers of milk. He lived in the little farmhouse that went along with the property but drove to his mother’s every day at seven o’clock, for supper. Breakfast and lunch he managed on his own.

Willi was an even-tempered, happy man, just like his father, but it was obvious that he was lonely. Sometimes, at family gatherings when his parents huge living room was filled with brothers and sisters, brothers in law and sisters in law, nieces and nephews, he grew suddenly silent and working his way unobtrusively round the merry making crowd to the door, went home early. There were times when a person who knew how to read his pleasant, stoical mask could see that he was mildly depressed. The person who could do this best was Evelyn, with whom he was particularly close. One summer’s day when they were drinking coffee on the front porch of their parent’s place she said to him.

“Why don’t you find yourself a woman?”

Willi laughed.

“I’m serious.”

“I’ve lived forty-three years without one and I haven’t grown any handsomer in that time that I have noticed.”

“O Willi you are always going on about how ugly you are. There are many women in this world who are more interested in character in a man than a pretty face. And besides, you may not be handsome but you have a noble face. Especially when women reach middle age a noble face is more attractive than a pretty one.”

“Well, whatever my face is I haven’t noticed a lot of women rushing up to look into it.”

“My goodness, Willi, you are going to be waiting a long time if you expect a woman to come up to your farm and tackle you in the cow yard. It is customary for the man to make some kind of effort. Maybe in the cities it’s different but out here things are still very traditional.”

“What kind of effort?”

“You could go to the church dances.”

“I can’t dance.”

“You could learn.”

“I don’t like dances.”

Evelyn screwed up her face and threw her hands into the air. “Well then, don’t.”

“It’s hard for a man my age to learn all that dancing and social stuff. There must be some other way. There must be women around like me who don’t like going to dances. Down home women, a bit on the frumpy side.”

Evelyn smiled. “One who likes to milk cows.”

“Yes.”

“And make cheese.”

“Yes.”

“I would be guessing they are rare.”

“Rare perhaps but still there must be the odd one.”

“How old?”

“Same as me give or take a year or two.”

“Not younger?”

“No. A younger woman would nag me. I don’t want to be nagged.”

“Middle aged women can nag too.”

“No doubt but on the whole, I’ve noticed they are less ambitious. Nagging comes from ambition.”

“My goodness, I thought you were asleep all these years, Willi.”

“I observe. I watch.”

“Well, I could ask around I suppose. Does it matter that she’s fat?”

“No. I’m a bit fat myself.”

“And what would be the main qualities of character that you would be looking for?”

“Good natured with a sense of humour.”

“Tall, short?”

“A little taller would be OK. It would be hard to find one shorter.”

“What about money?”

Willi gave his sister an astonished look. “Do you mean I will have to pay for her?”

“No you silly man. I’m asking if she would have to have money.”

“No. Certainly not. I have lots of money. Well, not lots perhaps but more than I need.”

“Just asking. Would it matter if she’s lame?”

“Not as long as she can get around fairly well. And I would ask that she have a certain brightness to her. I wouldn’t want one of those sad women who talk of nothing but their ailments.”

“Well then,” Evelyn said, “I’ll ask around.”

At a September supper at their parents Evelyn told him, “I’m still looking.” On Christmas day she took Willi aside and said,

“I think I found somebody.”

“Really?”

“Yes really. She works at the bakery. She’s a baker so you have probably never seen her. She starts at midnight and goes home at nine in the morning. She’s not from around here. She came here perhaps three years ago. She lives in that old apartment building beside the post office. She’s a friend of Lilly’s.” (Lilly was the second sister)

“You told Lilly?”

“Of course. How do you think I’m going to find somebody if I don’t ask people?”

“Who else did you ask?’

“You don’t want to know.”

Willi looked sadly into his glass of beer. “I suppose everyone knows.”

“If you don’t tell people you want something Willi, then it is unlikely you are going to get it. Anyway, you better go in there on Saturday and buy some bread. On Saturdays she works until noon so you can get a look at her.”

“And she at me.”

“Oh she’s already had that.”

“How?”

“Lilly showed her pictures.”

“And what did she say?”

“She said you are very handsome.”

“You are lying.”

“Not exactly.”

“OK, then what did she really say?”

“She was brought up on a farm with horses. She said you remind her of a Percheron.”

Willi looked off into the distance and thought of that for a moment or two. Then he said. “ Maybe most people wouldn’t think so but I am a great admirer of Percherons and I think that is a very nice thing for her to say about me. What’s her name?”

“Roslyn. But everybody calls her Roz.”

“OK. I’ll go in this Saturday.”

After milking on Saturday Willi drove to town. To prepare he had a bath and shave, put on his best pair of jeans and a brand new plaid shirt. He polished his cowboy boots and combed his hair. On Evelyn’s advice he restrained himself from putting lotion in his hair. When he came into the bakery, fortunately, or at least it seemed so to Willi, Roz was serving another customer so he brought his two loaves of bread from the owner. He managed a few unobtrusive glances her way. She was taller than he was with a plump, reddish face. She looked tired as no doubt she was after working all night. She was about his age. Her hair was dark brown with a sprinkling of steel gray. You wouldn’t say she was beautiful but she was a pleasing looking woman. And if she was a friend of Lilly’s she would have a steadiness to her. Lilly didn’t hang out with flighty types. All in all he was pleased and he told Evelyn so at the next Sunday dinner.

“Well then,” said Evelyn, “we’ll have to go on to the next step.”

“Which is?”

“You have to ask her out.”

“Where?”

“A picnic perhaps.”

“Evelyn, it’s February the sixteenth.”

“Oh yes. Well, you can take her to that new restaurant on 72.”

“How do I ask her?”

“Why you just step up to her and ask.”

“But where?”

“At the bakery. If you are at the bakery on Tuesday morning at nine she will be coming out to walk home. Not in the street, of course. Take her to the diner and buy her a coffee.”

Willi was so afraid of missing her that on Tuesday morning he took up his post outside the Post Office at 8:15. It was a frigid morning. He stood just inside the alley between the Post Office and the town hall to get out of the wind. The banks of snow were higher than his eye level but there was a section cleared in front of the Post Office giving a view of the bakery door. He had on long underwear, a ski suit, his fur hat tied down around his ears, two scarves, a pair of gigantic lined leather mitts and his vast, cumbersome overcoat but still he was cold.

Roz came out the bakery door and started along the far sidewalk towards her apartment. After a moment of hesitation Willi rushed through the opening in the bank and across the street at the angle necessary to intercept her. On the other side he went through another opening arriving on the sidewalk some twenty feet in front of her. Here he stood waiting for her to come up. Roz was looking down at her feet as she came along and almost ran into him.

“How long have you been here?” she asked. “You look like you are frozen solid.”

And indeed he did for the moisture of his breath had turned his moustache and his eyebrows a brilliant white with a kind of personal hoar frost.

“Not long.” he said.

He asked her if she would like coffee at the diner and she said yes. There Roz told him she didn’t like fancy restaurants any more than he did so that Sunday they went for a ride in Willi’s truck.

Willi’s truck was ancient. It was old when he bought it fifteen years before. For the first ten years it was a rusty green . Then Willi ground out the rust, filled it here and there and sprayed it with grey undercoating. Each year for the past five years he planned to sand it and put on the finish coats but he never got around to it. The undercoating was splotchy and the filling rough. He told people he never got around to the finish coat because he had so many other things to do. This was partially true but the more essential reason was that he couldn’t stand the thought of a brand new paint job being chipped and scarred by the rough gravel roads. He knew if he painted it he would be miserable every time he took it out of the yard. With the rough undercoat on it, touched up now and then with a spray can, he didn’t have to wince every time a piece of gravel pinged against his rocker panels. It was a work truck. It’s scarred and uneven exterior seemed as appropriate as the thick coating of rust on the engine panels of his old tractor.

Roz loved the truck. When Willi mentioned he planned to paint it she asked, “Why? It’s a beautiful old truck. Just right.” Willi was delighted although it was hard to tell from the severe expression on his face. It was the same with the house. When he showed her around mentioning plans for redoing this and redoing that Roz was unimpressed. “It needs to be cleaned, Willi, but why put in a new kitchen floor when the old one is perfectly serviceable?” And indeed it needed to be cleaned. It was not what most would call disgusting but close. Roz fairly itched to grab a pail and brush and start in right away but she restrained herself. The barn was different. You could eat off the channeled concrete floor. It smelt of cow, of course, but the clean fresh smell of the animals with a slight underlay of disinfectant. Bright plastic and shiny stainless steel. The cheese house was the same except there was the delicious, rich smell of the curing cheeses. When they came back to the house they had some of Willi’s cheese and Roz’s homemade bread for lunch. Then they went for a long walk down the gravel road past the snow-covered fields. It was a bright winter day, no wind, the sun shining and the sky a deep blue.

Roz and Willi got together for ten consecutive Sundays. As well, on Tuesdays and Fridays, Roz’s days off, they went to the diner for breakfast. They both liked the diner. The old woman who was the cook, owner, server and cleaner would have no truck with fancy new contraptions. She fried her eggs in a pan she had been using to fry eggs for over fifty years. Coffee was served in crockery cups bought at a yard sale years before. The place was sparkling clean but its cleanliness was appropriate, shining like a bright sun over a world comfortably worn and useful. Willi and Roz dawdled over coffee, gossiping with the old woman who knew every soul within fifty miles of the town and exactly how they were related to everyone else. She was a great mimic. Her rendition of the Mayor giving his pretentious speech at the Civic Holiday celebrations was so funny, so ridiculously accurate, Roz and Willi rolled in their chairs and laughed until their sides ached.

On the eleventh Sunday Roz was helping Willi in the barn. She was messaging oil into the udder of a cow while Willi stroked the cow’s flank to keep her calm. He kept on stroking while he said. “I suppose we could get married Roz.” Roz didn’t say anything but she smiled mightily at the cow’s udder. After a short pause Willi continued. “I know I’m not much but if you came to live here you could sleep in the night like a natural human being and in your old age you would have your own porch to sit on.” Roz got up off her stool and kissed him on the cheek. “Of course I’ll marry you, Willi; I thought you would never ask.” The banns were posted the next Sunday and they were married in the fall.

The following spring Willi and Evelyn were sitting on their parent’s front porch. It was a glorious spring day, the kind of day that only those who have gone through a hard, five month winter, can truly appreciate. They sat full in the warming sunshine as people in those parts always do in the first few weeks of spring. The snow was almost gone; the water running. The geese were back, tadpoles in the ponds and in the late evenings the coyotes gave out their mating calls in the woods to the north. Calves were frisking in the field beyond the yard and the fertile, musky smell of the newly uncovered earth rose into their nostrils, the most gorgeously rich smell in all of creation. Evelyn and Willi sat looking out for some time before Evelyn spoke. She pointed a finger at his old truck parked just beyond the porch, still sheathed in its covering of splotchy gray and said, “When, in heaven’s name, are you going to paint that truck, Willi?”

“Never!” said Willi in a triumphant tone which brought Evelyn’s head around to look at him curiously. “And why not?” she asked.

Willi smiled hugely. A bright twinkle, truly a wonderful sight to behold, rose in his eyes as he looked at his sister and said,

“Because Roz won’t let me.”

Lawyer Flavin

The house was many gabled, spacious, rambling and placed between two rises protecting it from the prevailing winds. Yet its southern windows opened onto a clear view of the sea. Some would call it ramshackle but this was inaccurate. It was a sound house with a sound foundation, a good roof keeping out the rain and no rot, no termites and no mould. It was, however, in need of caulking, desperately in need of a paint job and the gutter along the north side hung somewhat loosely upon the facia. The deck, a later addition to the much older main structure, sweeping across the full width of the front, slumped toward the driveway but it was essentially intact and needed only to be jacked and supported. From the moment she laid eyes upon it Marcia was entranced by its lonely eccentricity and its gentle air of seasoned companionship. She was careful, however, not to allow this enchantment to communicate itself to real estate agent - young, bushy tailed and ceaselessly babbling - who accompanied her on her tour through the rooms without, or at least it seemed so to Marcia, seeing a single thing, so keen was he to send forth a river of words and irrelevant comment. She knew houses. Her dead husband had been a renovating carpenter and unlike many women she was interested in what he did. While the agent babbled she looked very carefully at everything she should look at, stuck a small penknife into certain spots where it was necessary to stick a small penknife, and with a hammer she carried in the inside pocket of her coat tore a small hole in the exterior kitchen wall under the cabinets to examine the insulation. He hardly noticed but he was a bit surprised when she opened the cleanout door in the brick chimney and made him hold a flashlight shining upwards into the chimney hole while she climbed a rickety ladder onto the roof and looked down. Clear but requiring a good cleaning, although for the agent’s consumption she frowned and shook her head sadly while he saw moving off into the distance a sale which would pay three monthly payments on the second hand sports car waiting for them in the driveway.

In those days large, isolated houses in the rural areas were inexpensive. It was before the moneyed classes decided to imitate the English and abandon the city weekends and vacations for a country estate. Marcia, with her small pension and even smaller capital, felt a moment of pure joy when the agent told her the asking price and was even happier a few moments later when he told her if she bid one third less no doubt the owner would accept. The house had been on the market three years without attracting a single offer. Marcia, when young, had suffered considerable pain as a result of being vague about money and in middle age had transformed herself into a hard nosed negotiator. She offered one half the list price and, after two days of dithering, the owner accepted.

The house in the city was rented but without a lease. The legal requirement for notice was one month but the landlord, a lanky septuagenarian by the name of Mr. Toggle, had, in the five years of Marcia’s occupancy, been very kind and Marcia did not want to cause him injury. After talking on the phone they agreed to two months. Sylvia and Marcia then set to patching holes in the wallboard, giving away some of the pets, fixing the railing on the back porch and, with the assistance of Mr. Toggle, laying new linoleum on the kitchen floor, the old being worn and showing black patches.

Mr. Toggle was sad to see them go. A widower living alone in a house two doors down, he had been happy to have a place in the neighbourhood to drop in for coffee. Although not required under the rental contract he cleared the snow and cut the grass. Marcia was sure that he was a little sweet on Sylvia, a septuagenarian herself. At least when Sylvia was in the kitchen he lingered over his coffee a lot longer than when it was Marcia. “At my age,” said Sylvia, “I like talking to men but am not much interested in doing anything else with them.” At the time of their leaving whether Mr. Toggle was interested in doing anything else was left unsolved. He was such a gothic man that even if he were interested his Calvinism would have prevented him from any mention of it.

Two months after the purchase of the new house happened to be a Saturday. Marcia backed the eighteen seater school bus into the back yard. Two of the boys and Mr. Toggle, suffering under a series of irrelevant and impractical instructions from Sylvia, hooked up the big trailer to the hitch on the back of the bus. The bus had been stripped of the back seats for they only needed twelve. Into the space thus created, the girls, Hermione, Clare, Melody and Consuela, packed all the kitchen things still unpacked, and, thank heavens, still had enough room for the packing of the odds and ends inevitably forgotten until the end. The boys, Fred, John, Manuel, Peter and Alexander, under the supervision of Mr. Toggle, loaded four sofas, six armchairs, a dining room table, twelve dining room chairs, and three bed frames onto the roof racks atop the bus. This they tied on with an assortment of ropes, clothesline and electrical wires. Mr. Toggle returned to his own home coming back with long coil of thick rope which the two older boys lashed over the other lashings just to make sure. Then all the neighbours who were watching came to say goodbye. Mr. Toggle, to Marcia’s great surprise, kissed all the children as they entered the bus and, in return, was kissed on the cheek by Marcia before she climbed into the driver’s seat and drove off. When she turned the corner at the end of the street she tooted the bus’s tinny horn three times and they were gone.

The road to the new house followed the seacoast and thus went up and down and snaked sinuously from side to side, sometimes traveling through channels with sheer, blasted cliffs on either side, sometimes through flower sprinkled meadow land sweeping its bright green to the edge of the shore. The children were delighted with the scenery and they shouted and sang, oohed and ahhed and were so filled with its beauty and newness that they forgot to fight. Sylvia fell asleep. Marcia, her hands at the ten o’clock position on the steering wheel, dealt with keeping the bus between the double lines and the shoulder of the road. After two hours (Marcia refused to go faster than 80 kilometers an hour, so for a normal driver it would have been a hour and a half) they arrived in the little village five kilometers from the new house. Here they stopped to stretch their legs and eat an ice cream cone. The few people about stared at them as if they were members of a traveling circus but when they stared back shyly turned away and moved off. Marcia introduced herself to Mr. O’Leary, the storekeeper, who besides ice cream, sold groceries, clothing, hardware and lawn decorations. The young gas station attendant, for Mr. O’Leary also sold gas, stared wonderingly at the trailer from which came a queer collection of animal sounds. The older girls made faces at him from the bus windows and the boys made fun of the girls for making faces. Fifteen minutes latter they pulled into the long driveway which led up to the house. The children dismounted, an accurate word, for they leaped from the bus like they might leap from the back of a horse. Marcia and Sylvia followed, Sylvia holding in her hand the list given her by Marcia.

Three older girls - third floor where there were three tiny bedrooms but privacy. The stair was a captain’s ladder with a trapdoor at the top, most useful for repulsing vulgar, raiding boys. Into the three tiny rooms the girls had to fit beds, bureaus, clothing, personal effects, school gear, four rabbits, three cats and a small, nervous dog. Fortunately there was a balcony and it was summer. Here, out in the fresh air, they put the rabbit cages where the droppings and urine would fall onto the roof and save them a lot of cleaning. The cats, of course, went wherever they liked, two immediately out onto the roof to examine the gables. There they sat, in the leaning way of cats on a slanted roof, gazing off suspiciously at the sea in the distance. The dog, confused after his confinement in close quarters with so many cats and rabbits, crawled under one of the beds and went to sleep. After things were reasonably set to rights, the girls made tea on an illegal gas stove (banned as a fire hazard by Sylvia, a ban which the girls agreed to verbally but ignored in reality) and sat down to do their nails. They all agreed they held a superior strategic position in the new house, being able to hurl things down the stairs at their enemies, the boys, and then quickly close the trapdoor and stand on it to avoid reprisals. They also agreed that this happy state of affairs was mostly due to two women running the house and how fortunate they were that it was so. They shuddered at the horrors which might have occurred if the boys had been given the top floor.

The second floor housed five bedrooms, one each for Fred, Peter, Alexander, John and Manuel. One was larger than the others and, surprisingly, they all agreed it should go to Alexander, the oldest. A smelly English sheep dog, a fat old tom cat, a French bulldog, a burrowing owl, a crow, an ant farm, three garter snakes in a glass aquarium, and three white rats nosed and beaked their way around the new quarters and found them satisfactory. When the boys had everything in order, an order which Sylvia had to insist on by threatening not to cook supper if it wasn’t achieved, they hung their upper bodies out the two large windows in Alexander’s room and smoked a joint. Despite their attempts to blow the smoke off into the sea smelling air the girls smelt it but said nothing, for they knew the boys could hear the hissing of their gas stove but said nothing. The old tomcat howled piteously as if he were being treated cruelly, which couldn’t be farther from the truth for a more pampered, scrap fed, patted and fussed over tomcat could not be found in the whole world. Peter picked him up and rubbed his ears and he went to sleep.

The bottom floor was mostly living room and dining room, happily opened up some years ago. There were two small bedrooms at the back, one for Sylvia and one for Marcia and Consuela. Consuela was only three. The kitchen was a huge country kitchen with a central working counter and forty running feet of cupboards and counters against the walls. There was a small pantry at the back. The deck acted as an entrance and overlooked the sea. Here Consuela played with her dolls , arranging them on a bench which ran the length of the railing.

Where did all these children come from and why were they living with Sylvia and Marcia, two women well past child bearing age? The answer is complicated. Hermione, Clare and Consuela were Marcia’s grandchildren, the mother, Marcia’s daughter, no longer in the picture, father came to visit once a month. Melody was the daughter of Sylvia’s second cousin, mother and father occasionally coming for visits. Peter and Alexander were Sylvia’s great grandchildren, mother visiting regularly. Fred was Marcia’s grand nephew, parents whereabouts not known. John was the grandson of Marcia’s childhood friend who often came to visit. Manuel was related to Sylvia in such a complicated way, involving so many removes and half this and half that, even Sylvia required five minutes of intense concentration to figure it out clearly. To dispense with such complications she called Manuel her grandson and he called her nanny.

Sylvia and Marcia were cousins. Both had brought up children, now adults and scattered all over the globe. The children they were now bringing up they had acquired by a process of osmosis. One day a daughter left town leaving the child behind. One day a cousin, whose child was staying the weekend at Sylvia’s, left for Alaska. And so on. When they had reached a certain critical mass they decided to rent a house together and pool their pension checks. Some of the parents sent money on a regular basis, some sporadically, and some not at all. One reason they had decided to move to the country was they were full up. Two years previous they had also decided they were full up and yet now had two additional children. The truth was they could not find it in their hearts to refuse a child and yet they knew if they took on more things would become impossible. The grim reality was that isolated as they were now it would be much more difficult for relatives to dump spare and unwanted children into their laps, or at least it seemed so. Money was always a problem yet somehow they managed.

The house and the ten acres upon which it sat, were in Milbourne County. Twenty kilometers southwest along the coast was the small town which acted as the county seat. The names of the five town councilors who met there one day a week were unknown to Sylvia and Marcia as they were unknown to anyone but people who had lived in the county for some time and thus had dealings with the council. The council dealt with bread and butter issues such as drainage, roads and building permits and, if you had no interest in these then you could spend an entire lifetime ignoring their existence and suffer no ill effects from it.

Bilford Zizard was the councilor who represented the area where the house was situated. He was forty-five, handsome, short and overweight. He resembled one of those roly poly clowns children used to have, weighted at the bottom so that no matter how often you knocked them down or pushed them over they quickly uprighted themselves still smiling their wide, friendly, clown smile. Thus the secretaries at the county office referred to him as poly, short for roly poly. Bilford had a sense of humour so conventional as to easily pass for no sense of humour at all. It most certainly did not extend to nicknames referring to his roundness of shape and the secretaries were careful not to use the nickname in his presence or in the presence of those likely to report back to him.

Bilford was a contractor. He owned earth moving equipment which he rented out complete with operators to those who wanted basements dug, ditches cleared, culverts installed, roads constructed. He was an unusual in that section of the world for normally contractors there were also operators of equipment and Bilford was not. He did the financing, estimates, ordering, collected the bills and paid his men. He had an accounting system set up by a CA and he maintained it. Ten years ago he had been elected to council and then reelected twice since. He was not particularly popular but not unpopular either. He knew how to read a balance sheet. He knew what a mill rate was. He was experienced when it came to constructing roads, ordering drainage ditches dug, etc, so as a councilor one would have to say he was competent. For what amounted over the year to two days a week the county paid him about the same as one of his operators would make working the same amount of hours. So he wasn’t in it for the money, or at least for the money the county paid him.

But Bilford did have ambition. His ambition was to become a rich and powerful man. This had not dawned on him until he was in his mid thirties. Before that he was happy with his contracting work, with his wife and three children, Sunday mornings at the local church, his male buddies, fishing and hunting. The catalyst for his new ambition was being stiffed by a weekender building a luxurious country home who hired him to do the excavation work. When everything was done the man claimed there were deficiencies in the work and would only pay him one half of the amount originally agreed upon. Talk of deficiencies was only a pretext for the man not to pay the full bill. They both knew this but especially Bilford who was so furious he almost loaded his shotgun and drove over to shoot the man. He soon gave this up as even worst than being cheated but there was really nothing else he could do. The man was a lawyer, exceedingly wealthy, with a mean streak. Bilford did not have the money to sue him. The man would have tied up the proceedings in court endlessly until what little money he could afford ran out. There was nothing he could do.

The next year he ran for council, won, and sat on a few unimportant committees as a junior member. When he was reelected, however, he became the assistant chair of the Works Committee and two years later, when the old chairman retired because of ill health, the chair. This was a good position from which to further his ambitions. The works committee oversaw building contracts, development contracts, as well as administrating the projects the county did with their own employees. Development, that is the gathering together of sections of land for large scale home and cottage building financed by businessmen from the city, was coming to the fore. The old chairman was blind to the possibilities, both private and public, but Bilford was not. The developers courted him and he was willing to be courted. He oversaw the sale of certain parcels of county land in such a way as to deliver them inexpensively to his new friends. His new friends saw to it that he was given excavation contracts at very generous rates. He, working with his associate, as he called the building inspector, allowed building requirements he saw as too onerous to be ignored but in such a way that no amount of searching the paper trail would disclose anything either against him or his new friends. His new friends were grateful. Over a period of four years ten cottages were transferred to the name of his nephew, a young man with Down Syndrome, for nominal amounts. The cottages were rented out. Mortgages were taken out on the properties by the young man and construction equipment bought. The equipment was then rented to Bilford’s company for very reasonable rates. Soon he became the largest excavating contractor in the county. He became involved in larger and larger projects. One late winter he went with one of his new friends for a week in the sun in Panama. While there he visited a bank where his fingerprint was taken. In return he deposited a large amount of money in cash.

Marcia’s house was bordered on the west by a large section of land owned by one of Bilford’s new friends and on the east by county land about to be sold at one of Bilford’s ‘preferential’ sales. He had been working on the owner who sold to Marcia to sell to his dear nephew but the old man was cantankerous and difficult and things had dragged on. Bilford was in the Bahamas when the property was sold. The building inspector was in Toronto for a convention and thus the sale was registered at Titles by one of the secretaries who did not know of Bilford’s interest and even if she did would not have cared. When he came back Bilford was furious. He spoke sharply to the secretary and she spoke sharply back. Then Bilford had to pull in his horns and apologize. Secretaries in county seats have clan connections which are dangerous to antagonize.

Bilford stayed late at the office one night and checked the tax bill on Marcia’s property. There had been arrears before the sale but they were paid at the time of purchase. In working deals which might rebound upon him as a politician, Bilford had a policy of using proxies. There was an old man who still practiced law although he was seventy-seven years of age. Despite his age he was a tall, strong man who lived on a small farm outside town and still did all his own farm work, cutting winter wood, driving a team of Clydesdales to cut his hay and doing the upkeep on the fences and buildings. He would have stopped lawyering years before if he hadn’t married a second time at the age of sixty-five. His new wife had three children now at the university and he needed money to pay their expenses. His name was Peter Flavin but everyone called him Lawyer Flavin. He did mostly property work and had, in the past, occasionally done work for Bilford. Bilford didn’t entirely trust the old man for he had about him an independence of spirit which he found distasteful. But he had just learned that the old man had taken out a mortgage on his property and the payments were relatively high. The old man was in need of money.

He sent Lawyer Flavin over to talk to Marcia. His instructions were to sound her out about selling. If she was interested he was to make a kind of preliminary inquiry on price. He was not to mention any sum himself but to conduct himself in such a way that she might respond with a price herself. Bilford has gathered all the rumour and gossip he could about the two old women and the gang of scruffy, ragamuffin children who now lived in the house and came to the conclusion that the two elderly ladies were a bit scrambled in their brains. Several times in the past he had found very good pickings in similar situations.

Lawyer Flavin arrived on a Saturday morning just before noon. He parked his rusty Toyota in the gravel drive, climbed the front stairs and knocked on the door. Although he could hear the sounds of people inside, some time passed by with out anyone answering the door. He knocked again. A moment later the door opened but he had to drop his eyes to see who had done it. It was Consuela, dressed in a blue, fluffy, fairy dress with a halo suspended above her head upon a section of coat hanger wire. She was looking up at him with round, curious eyes.

“My goodness,” said Lawyer Flavin, “you must be the Queen of the Fairies!”

That such a large, dignified man should recognize her position, pleased Consuela who smiled a wide, wide smile and wiggled her little body in delight. Lawyer Flavin stepped in and closed the door.

“Marcia’s in the kitchen,” Consuela informed him, reaching out her hand. Lawyer Flavin took her hand and she led him through the living room into the kitchen. Marcia was kneading bread on the center counter.

“You must be Marcia,” said Lawyer Flavin. “The Queen of the Fairies here told me you were in the kitchen.”

“Why thank you for answering the door, Consuela.” Said Marcia. “Or perhaps I should say Your Majesty.”

Consuela smiled another smile, then, suddenly shy, turned on her heels and ran out of the room and up the stairs to tell the girls on the third floor about the nice tall man, who, flying in the face of their scepticism, recognized her right away as The Queen of the Fairies.

“I can’t shake your hand right now,” said Marcia, holding up her floury hands, “but I’ll be finished with this in a few moments. Please sit at the table.”

The table was a long, pine affair, scratched with the scratches of many thousands of meals and scarred here and there with burns and carved initials. Lawyer Flavin pulled out a chair and sat down. When Marcia finished kneading, she divided the loaves, placed them in the pans and covered them with a damp tea towel. She washed her hands in the kitchen sink and came over to shake his hand.

“I’m Marcia Fullminster.”

“And I’m Peter Flavin, but everyone around here calls me Lawyer Flavin.”

Two of the third floor girls appeared in the doorway. They looked with great curiosity at Lawyer Flavin, who they thought, with his bright shock of white hair and well pressed dark blue suit, to be enormously distinguished. Perhaps he might be a great, kindly rich man, a stand in for the benevolent heavenly Father they had learned about in Sunday School. For once, Consuela was not telling fibs or wandering off into the land of make believe. They smiled shyly and Marcia introduced them.

“This is Melody and Clare. Girls, this is Peter Flavin but he says the people around here call him Lawyer Flavin.”

“Hello girls.”

“Hello,” the girls replied. Then they turned and ran up to the second floor to tell the boys.

When Marcia put a cup of coffee before him and sat down on the other side of the table, Lawyer Flavin said, “I represent a third party, whose name, I am afraid, my instructions do not allow me to disclose at this time. This third party is interested in buying your house.”

“Well, Peter Flavin, the third party better get interested in buying another house. I just finished buying this one and I don’t want to go through all that again. However, if your third party is tremendously rich and wants to pay me, say, three times what I paid for it, well then I might consider it. I have eight children to bring up and I could use the money.”

Lawyer Flavin laughed. “If you knew my third party you wouldn’t suggest such a thing.”

“Well, that would be the end of that then.”

Sylvia then entered the kitchen. She was a short, thin woman, dressed in a threadbare dress covered with fading roses and wearing a pair of rimless glasses. When Marcia started to speak she put up her hand in a traffic cop gesture and said, “Don’t bother, Mar. My spies have told me everything.” Then, coming over to Lawyer Flavin she put out her hand. The old man put out his and they shook. “I’m Sylvia,” she said. “You’ll be staying for lunch, of course.”

Lawyer Flavin was about to protest but the women ignored him.

“Stay right in that chair, Peter Flavin,” said Marcia. “Then you’ll be on side of Consuela. She is smitten with you and will refuse to have it any other way.”

So he stayed where he was while around him the women set the table and children came in and took their places. They asked him to say grace. He hadn’t said grace in fifty years and was surprised he remembered the old one from his childhood table. Grace finished, Consuela crawled up on his lap. Marcia was about to order her back to her place but the old man said. “Please. It’s no trouble at all.” Marcia relented. So Consuela ate lunch from Lawyer Flavin’s lap. He buttered bread for her and, when she was finished her dessert, gave her half of his own. Marcia watched this with some suspicion but then decided that it wouldn’t hurt Consuela to be spoilt a bit by this graceful old stranger.

“I don’t live in town. I have a farm not far from here,” said Lawyer Flavin in response to Alexander’s very correct and well dictioned question.

“And do you have Horses there, sir?” Alexander was mad about horses and considered much of the world an evil plot to keep him away from them.

“As a matter of fact I do.”

This answer sent a jolt of lightening through Alexander’s body which took the exercise of all his will power to at least partially disguise.

“And what kind of horses would they be, sir?” he asked, doing his best to make this question appear casual. It was obvious, however, that his entire being was focused intensely to hear the answer.

“Several kinds. Two Clydesdales, an old thoroughbred, a pony and three quarter horses.”

“And how far away would your farm be, sir?

“Five kilometers or so. But I would ask you, young man, not to call me sir. It makes me feel like I were my father, very dignified and stiff and about to be enshrined in the family vault. Please call me Peter.”

Lunch finished, the children washed and put away the dishes while the adults had tea in the dining room. “Where do they all come from?” asked Lawyer Flavin. Sylvia and Marcia, going back and forth between them, told him.

“Do you have legal custody?” he asked.

“For some.” Replied Marcia.

“It can be useful. If you want I would do it for you for free. You would just have to pay for the actual costs, document registration and so on. It’s not too much.”

“Thank you. We will probably take you up on that,” said Sylvia.

Then Lawyer Flavin rose to leave. As he was going out the front door he turned and saw Alexander watching him.

“If they let you, young man, you could come back with me to look at the horses. Have you ridden before?”

“Only at the fair, “said Alexander.

Marcia and Sylvia had no objections so Alexander accompanied the old man back to his farm. They put his mountain bike in the back of the pick up so he could ride back on his own. Marcia came out to see them off. As the old man was about to release the clutch and back out of the driveway, he said.

“Make sure you pay your taxes on time. Don’t ask me why. Pay them the day before the deadline at the latest. If you have problems doing that let me know. Under no circumstance let it go beyond the deadline. And make sure you keep the receipt. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, I think so.”

Lawyer Flavin backed out of the driveway, Alexander proudly riding shotgun.

When Lawyer Flavin told him about his meeting with Marcia, Bilford was suspicious. Perhaps the old fool was working his own angle. But after talking with him a while, he decided he was telling the truth. The old lady didn’t want to sell? Well, there were ways.

“How many kids do those two have over there?” He asked Flavin.

“I’m not sure. Quite a few.”

Lawyer Flavin didn’t like the look in Bilford’s eye. When Bilford handed him his cash payment he was just about to beg off any further work, pleading his workload on the farm but then his mind suddenly changed track. If he bowed out the women could be blindsided. He decided to stay. He put the cash in his inside pocket. They were having coffee in the café. It was early afternoon and, other than themselves and the middle aged owner behind the counter, the place was empty. He could literally smell the evil content of Bilford’s mind.

“You wouldn’t think two old women like that would be competent to look after all those children, would you? Perhaps Child and Family should be told about a situation like that. Two half witted old ladies and a firetrap house full of young children.”

Bilford smiled an oily smile and Lawyer Flavin made himself smile back in a conspiratorial way. He forced his eyes to light up with comprehension and shook his head slowly in wondrous contemplation at Bilford’s cleverness.

“You understand what I mean , then?”

“Oh yes,” the Lawyer said appreciatively. “But I would be careful if I were you. The older one, Sylvia, goes to the Lutheran church. She teaches in the Sunday School there. Apparently she has degrees and qualifications in that sort of thing. The other woman who helps out in the Sunday School is the Chair of Child and Family. A complaint to Child and Family could backfire on whoever made it.”

“I wouldn’t be so stupid as to make it myself, Lawyer Flavin.”

“No, of course not. You are too experienced for that. But a complaint immediately discounted can be dangerous. Someone may be able to figure out that someone other than the actual complainant was behind it. Even if they can’t prove it, people begin to talk. Then someone drinks a little too much one night and a name is mentioned. Then others start asking why such a bogus complaint was made in the first place. Then people start to speculate. Like I say, it could be dangerous.”

“My God, I didn’t think you were so sly, Lawyer Flavin.”

The old man smiled. ”I’ve been around a long time, Bilford. I’ve seen just about everything.”

“Well, perhaps you are right. Maybe the best thing would be to send you back with a reasonable offer. Somewhat above what they paid.”

They ordered more coffee and spoke for another half hour.

The next Saturday morning the boys were working on an old sailboat Marcia bought at a garage sale. Hermione, who even among the boys, was accepted as the master of technology, had convinced them that the best way to seal the old wooden hull was to fiberglass it. They paddled it with two canoe paddles around the point from where they bought it and turned it over on the sandy beach below the house. The boys had already tore off any rotted boards on one side and replaced them with plywood they rescued from the landfill. Hermione and Peter were beginning to apply the fiberglass.

When Lawyer Flavin drove up the driveway Alexander was sitting on the deck. He stood up as the old man began climbing the stairs. When he reached the top Lawyer Flavin sat in one of the deck chairs to rest. He looked at Alexander and said “Being an old man is not so bad, Alexander. In the past ten years I’ve had some of the most enjoyable times in my life. Old age gets bad press from the poor fools who think death a great evil. If death is a great evil, then the closer you come to it the more miserable you are, right? Well, wrong. If you do a few things right the closer you come the more you can enter into a freedom of the mind, and this freedom of the mind is the only really great joy available to a human being. Like all the other things it too passes, but it has a great depth in it’s passing not available in the others. My wife says to me this morning, “Where is that young boy, Alexander?” “How should I know, Gilly?” I reply. She says you can come every day if you like. The pony misses you and so do the others. They get bored being in the pasture by themselves all day.”

Alexander face lit up. “O sir, that’s wonderful! O that’s truly wonderful!”

“After you ask Marcia or Sylvia you can go over on your own on the bike right now, if you like. Or you can wait for me.”

But Alexander had received permission from Sylvia three hours ago and had paced the deck ever since, moving through alternate states of hope and despair. He ran down the stairs hitting perhaps every third one, hopped onto his bike and drove down the driveway. Lawyer Flavin waited till he was out of earshot and laughed so loudly that Sylvia came and opened the door to see what was going on.

“So the horse maniac is off, is he, Lawyer Flavin?”

“Like the wind, Sylvia, like the wind.” The old man rose and followed her inside to the kitchen.

Bilford came out to see Lawyer Flavin on Sunday afternoon. He came into the barn and started talking as soon as he saw the old man brushing down one of the big Clydesdales. But Lawyer Flavin put up his hand to stop him. Alexander was on the other side of the horse. The two men walked out of the barn and across the yard to lean on the pasture fence.

“Well?” said Bilford. Sometimes Flavin’s old style manner which dictated that the point of a conversation be delayed for some time after its beginning annoyed him to no end. He was a busy man. He didn’t have all day to trade genteel inanities with the old fool.

Before he answered Lawyer Flavin moved along the fence until he came to a bench. He sat down at one end of the bench and Bilford sat at the other, as far away as possible. The old man had figured he would do that. Bilford had almost a phobia of physical closeness.

“Well, let’s have it.” Bilford was one of those men with money who, when they engage a person’s services, assume a kind of bullying intimacy with them. Lawyer Flavin paid no attention to his tone. He had survived several dozen of this kind.

“I made the offer but she refused.”

“Well, she’ll regret that, by God.”

Flavin said nothing. He looked off toward the farmhouse where Bilford’s Beamer sat in the driveway under the trees. Bilford got to his feet and started pacing back and forth. Lawyer Flavin kept his place and eventually, after he had walked of some off his frustration, Bilford returned to his seat on the bench.

“I’ll have to do a tax thing on those bitches. Come back tomorrow dear. And then put through the papers for the sale the next morning. I’ve done it with others and I’ll do it with them. Fucking big city bitches. Think they can come out here and get in the way of progress. Do they like you, Flavin?”

“I would say so, yes.”

“Maybe you can convince them to let you handle some of their affairs. Get a cheque for the tax bill and then forget to pay it. What do you think?”

“That might be possible.”

“Well, it better be possible. Otherwise, what in the hell am I paying you for, Flavin? I don’t run a charity for old geezer lawyers.”

Lawyer Flavin wheezed out a manufactured laugh but Bilford was so unobservant that he accepted it as a complement to his wit. He crossed and then recrossed his legs. He furrowed his brow and rubbed his hands together as if he were washing them in the sink. It was a warm day. Beads of sweat broke out on his forehead and he wiped them away with his handkerchief.

“And if that doesn’t work there are other ways. Old firetraps like that have been known to burn down in the middle of the night. I know a guy who helps them along. And if those old bitches burn along with it then so be it. Buy the land for taxes and put a dozer on it to clear away the debris. Fuck, it’s easy as pie. Those old bitches don’t know who they are up against. They think they are dealing with some country clodhopper, some hayseed. Well they are going to find out different. I’ll hire someone to put weed killer in their well. That’ll fix those old cunts and those snotty little brats of theirs too.” Bilford had worked himself up to a fever pitch. His face had become dangerously red and he punctuated these comments by punching the empty air as if the women had suddenly appeared in front of him and he was smashing their images with his meaty fists.

You would think all this would distress Lawyer Flavin but, on the contrary, he was delighted and had to exert himself not to show it. This was not too difficult because Bilford was so wrapped up in his anger he hardly noticed the old man’s reaction. When he figured Bilford had calmed down enough he said,

“Maybe you should offer them a little more. They seemed quite interested in the last offer. A little sweetening might just do it.”

Bilford was suspicious. Maybe the old man was climbing into bed with those two old hags. “How much sweetening?”

“Ten percent?”

Bilford thought about this for a while. The other methods always carried with them a danger. People talked. Somebody you hadn’t expected to suddenly comes up with a brother in law who’s a lawyer. Someone screws up and gets caught and it costs a whole lot of hush money to cover it up. Ten percent on the original offer wasn’t much. Compared to what he would make out of the whole deal, it was peanuts.

“OK.Ten percent. But that’s all, not a penny more.” Having said this he whisked himself off to his car and drove away. Lawyer Flavin watched him go. How can a man make himself believe he’s moving himself toward a wonderful heaven when, in reality, he is creating for himself the most painful kind of hell? He thought about this for a moment and then rose and walked across the yard and into the barn.

“Finished, Alex?’

“Yes, Mr. Flavin.” In the city Alex had spent two years in the air cadets. It was impossible for him to call Lawyer Flavin by his first name. But at least Mr. Flavin was better than sir.

Three months later Lawyer Flavin was seated in a lawn chair on Marcia’s deck looking out to sea. Hermione, Clare and Melody were sailing the boat around the point. The hull was painted a nail gloss red with old enamels the boys had found at the landfill. The sail was bright yellow, made from nylon Gilly had bought years ago at a closing out sale. Sylvia had made them a pennant from some old bunting found in the corner of the church basement. If the wind was right, Saturday mornings the girls sailed to town and brought back groceries. The boys took over in the afternoon, sometimes sailing twenty kilometers down the coast to an island where they tied up the boat and cooked hotdogs for supper. They were not supposed to go that far but they did anyway.

The burrowing owl was sitting on the back of his chair. The owl, predictably, was called Who. Flavin had tried to convince the boys to rename him Diogenes but classical culture was no longer a part of the school curriculum and they failed to see the point. Who was swaying very slightly from side to side. His eyes were closed. Consuela had fallen asleep in the shade and the French bulldog was asleep beside her. Here Flavin had achieved some success. By telling the boys horrible, gory stories of the Terror during the French Revolution, out of earshot of Marcia and Sylvia, of course, he had convinced the boys to change the bulldog’s name from Gob to Danton. Two cats were sitting on the railing in the sunshine and the crow was preening his feathers on the roof. As with Who, the crow was named predictably - Caw. Flavin was speaking to Sylvia.

“My oldest stepson is into electronic gadgets. There is a lab at his university and he borrowed the equipment from there. He wired me, I believe they call it, with a battery operated mike. The camera was at the end of the drinking trough, the body of it hidden in a little mound of dirt. Beforehand we set the angle by me sitting on the end of the bench where we hoped to get Bilford to sit. The camera was connected to a switch operated by my stepson and the wire to the switch in a trough we dug into the ground. My stepson turned it on from where he was hiding behind the south wall of the barn.”

“And here I thought you were an innocent old country gentleman.”

Lawyer Flavin laughed. “O but I am Sylvia. My behavior on that day was merely a lapse you see. Anyway, it worked out quite well. He sat exactly where we needed him to sit and said, more or less, exactly what we need him to say. He was very indiscreet. Wonderfully indiscreet. Usually people like him, in such situations speak a kind of ambiguous, metaphorical language. Even if you record him exactly what is being said is not clear. It is open to interpretation. But what he said that day was clear, horribly clear.”

“And then?”

“The Post Mistress is an old friend. She put a copy of the video in his box for me. He came out to see me the next day. He was angry of course, but I expected that. I spoke with him on the bench we recorded him on. Two of my stepsons were very visible nearby but out of hearing range. It is best to take precautions in such cases. After all I’m an old man and not really up to the rough stuff anymore. My stepson’s are quite large. They play football.” Flavin paused to take a drink of his lemonade.

“So are you recording me now you old bastard?” he asked me.

“No, no, Bilford, I already have a very good recording and I only need one. Many copies of course, but only one recording.”

He seemed to be resigned. He had probably watched that video a dozen times. Even to the most optimistic mind the jig was up. You would have to be very stupid to think you could wiggle out of it, and he may be on the sleazy side but he is very far from stupid. Anyway we talked for some time and got it all settled. The original copy of the video is in the safe of an old friend of mine in Montreal. That’s where I went to law school. And there it stays as a kind of guarantee. He tried mightily to get it out of me but, although I was flexible on other points, on that one I was unmovable. While I possess the video he will perform his side of the agreement. Without the video I can’t trust him. I agreed to destroy the copies and I did so. He knows very well that if he keeps his word the video will never come out of the safe and when I die my friend has instructions to destroy it.”

“So what did he have to do?”

“Ah! You are asking me to reveal secrets.”

“I won’t tell.”

Flavin gave her a very serious look. “Promise?”

“Yes. I won’t tell a soul. I promise.”

He looked at her again and then resumed his watching the boat fast approaching the point.

“He had to abandon the project which included this property. I thought this essential because otherwise you would always be in his way and the potential victims of his skullduggery. He has done this. He and his friends resold the land and bought more further down the coast. I also made him promise me he would never use on anybody the kind of tactics he had spoken about in the video. He promised and I genuinely think he will keep the promise, not out of any sense of morality, for he has none, but out of a sense of self protection. After all he has reached a point in his acquisitions where he no longer needs to even consider doing such things. He can make lots of money by a combination of acting legitimately and using his political position to procure favours for himself and his friends. As far as the procurement of favours go, I am afraid I am not much of a moralistic reformer. Since time immemorial people like Bilford have spun their webs and made their deals. It is not my cup of tea but then again I don’t provide employment and economic opportunity for anyone as he does, warts and all, for many hundreds. He’s not really that terrible a man you know. There are many far worst. I also think that much of what he said in the video was talking through his hat. I really don’t think he would have done those things. I think he was frustrated and blowing out his tubes. One can never be sure, of course. And the hat, for him, turned out to be a very expensive one.”

“How?”

“They tell me there were losses involved in moving the project and his friends insisted he pay them. If you don’t mind a little vulgarity, I suppose they told him it’s your ass we are removing from the sling, not ours.”

“And?”

“And?”

“I have heard rumors.”

“O, that. Well that’s not even a secret. Or it won’t be for long. He will be announcing a scholarship fund, named after himself, of course. A sizable sum for promising young students from the county. More than likely my stepsons, who are jocks mind you but at the same time A students, will receive one. Tuition, books and living. Very generous. I and two of my old geezer friends will be sitting on the board. Maybe when Alex finishes High School he could apply. And your other ones as well.”

By this time the boat was around the point and the bright yellow sail an afterimage, a chromatic memory.