Fever (8 page)

Palma dropped in unexpectedly about five o’clock one afternoon when I was lazing around with a new novel an acquaintance had just had published. It wasn’t very good, I didn’t think, and I was wondering what I would say in my letter to her.

“Let’s have a glass of wine,” I suggested to Palma, glad to put down the book.

“Heavens, no! I don’t drink,” she said.

“Come on,” I teased her. “One little glass won’t set you on the road to ruin.” She looked as if she was about to give me a lecture, then relented.

“Oh, all right,” she said, “but you have to promise me, I mean
promise
that you won’t tell anybody.” The village was full of female teetotallers, all innocent and pious women who must have felt that not allowing a drop of liquor to pass their lips would somehow redress the cosmic balance for the kids who drank too much beer and rolled their trucks, the old reprobates nothing would ever change, and those ranchers and farmers who drank whiskey to soothe their aches and to forget their bankers breathing down their necks.

Soon Palma was on her second half-glass, her cheeks were flushed a becoming pink, and her tongue thoroughly loosened. She sat across from me at the kitchen table and chattered away.

“I see those Hutterites coming to your door all the time,” she scolded. “Can you afford to buy so much? Don’t be afraid to tell them to buzz off if you don’t want to buy.”

“Are you suggesting they aren’t honest?” I asked. She hesitated, then nodded sagely.

“The young ones steal.” When I looked surprised, she hurried on.

“Nothing big or expensive, just little things, fasteners for their hair, cheap costume jewellery, things like that.” “I wonder why that is,” I said.

“Well, then, it’s what they believe,” she said, pursing her lips smugly.

“What they believe?” I prompted. Behind her in the back yard the June sun was shining warmly on the one tall cottonwood that was left—the others had had to be cut down, sawed into manageable
pieces and hauled away before the dead branches could blow down on the house. I wondered if the dead writer’s parents had planted them. His mother, I thought.

“That you can’t own anything,” she said, surprised at my ignorance. “They can’t have rings or earrings or necklaces, they think that’s sinful, and since they can’t have money, they steal. You can’t keep a young girl away from pretty things, you know. It isn’t natural. Betty in the Co-Op has to keep a weather eye on them whenever they come into the store.”

I was trying to decide whether this was true, or merely local prejudice. “Do you know they don’t want their kids educated? They’ve got their own school on the colony, but if they get educated, the first thing they do is leave, and the elders can’t have that. So they make it hard for the teacher. They’re forever taking their kids out of school to help kill geese or babysit during harvest or whatever, anything to keep them out of school. And they all stop going as soon as they’re old enough.”

“Do …” I began.

“And they won’t allow television or music except religious singing or even pictures on the walls. Now I ask you, how can you teach school without even pictures on the walls? Or tape recorders or radios?” She would have gone on and on, I saw no hope of stopping her if I had wanted to, but the phone rang and I went to my study to answer it. When I came back, she was rinsing our wineglasses in the sink.

“I can’t think why I stayed so long,” she said over the noise of the running water. “It was that darn wine. I never should have taken any. Now remember, you promised.”

“A little wine won’t hurt you,” I said. “But I promise.” She seemed to think I might put up a notice on the bulletin board in the café!

She set the glasses on the drainboard and wiped her hands
vigorously on a paper towel. “I don’t understand it at all,” she said. “The men drive tractors and big, expensive combines, but the teacher can’t even have a record player.” She looked up at me, frowning, her lips pursed, as if I might be able to explain it.

“I don’t understand it either,” I said, finally. She went out into the hall and stood by the door. I followed her. “My sister taught on one of the colonies for a couple of years. That’s how I know.” She went out without saying good-bye, shutting the door clumsily so that it banged, leaving me standing in the hall watching her figure, muted and wavering through the frosted oval glass of the door, disappear down the sidewalk.

I had lived in the town about three months. I should have been finished with the first draft of my novel, but there it sat, a thick enough pile of pages, but no longer the novel I had planned and begun in the city. I wasn’t wholly lost, but neither was I able to find the tone I wanted and to hold it steady. Instead, it fluctuated from the driving, energy-filled narrative of the first novel with its wry, angry tone that the critics had loved, all the way to the other extreme—a calm, almost meditative voice that I didn’t recognize and that was becoming harder and harder to break free of.

I picked up the stack of pages sitting beside my typewriter. They weighed satisfyingly heavy in my hands. I sat down on the old oak chair and flipped through them. There it was, that quiet, removed voice that made me think of the small river that flowed past my house—at night, when the moon was shining on it. Mixed in with passages of prose that might have come straight from my first novel.

I lifted my eyes from the pile of paper and stared out the window at the hills that were deepening into blues as night drew
down over the countryside. I could see now that while in my first book I had dealt with every conceivable problem of urban life—the constant hurry, the obsession with matters of style and taste, the driving passion to get ahead, the unspoken urge to transcend it all—what I had not dealt with was the possibility of any other way of life. It was as if I had been so involved myself in that life that I couldn’t even imagine any other way of living.

The more I wrote, the more it seemed to me that I was actually losing interest in that rich, perpetually exciting world. It had lost its urgency, had begun to seem dreamlike. I was having more and more trouble conjuring its colour, its sensuality, its speed. I even had moments when I felt I simply couldn’t be bothered.

I sat for a long time looking out the window behind my desk at the moon-washed hills and the high, winding coulee eroded back into them, a deep shadow now, and I saw two deer moving haltingly down the slope, going to water at the river. Abruptly I pulled down the blind, blocking out the scented countryside, pulling the small room back into itself. I sat a while longer, then I went upstairs to bed.

It was after that I found the dinosaur bone. I felt I had been spending too much time in the café in the evenings and I vowed that when the urge to go for a mindless chat with Harry and a cup of his foul-tasting coffee came upon me, I would instead, cross over the small footbridge at the end of the street and go for a walk across the prairie and up into the hills. I knew that once I was well away from the town the glimpses of deer or rabbits, hawks or even the occasional eagle, and the calm and beauty of the landscape would work its spell on me and I would forget how much I had wanted company. On one of these walks I went further than usual into the coulee, and spotting a white rock at the base of a steep clay cliff, I went closer to it to see it. I could tell at once that it was bone and of an animal so large there was nothing
on the prairie to rival it for size. A femur, perhaps. The piece newly exposed was not big enough to identify definitely, but I knew if I chose to dig I would find more, much more. I stayed out till dark that night and when I returned across the little footbridge, the coyotes were yipping and howling in the hills as if to mourn what I had uncovered.

Summer came, and I had begun a second draft. I went occasionally to the café again, where absolutely nothing seemed to have changed in my absence. One night when I was there Benjamin and a young companion were just finishing supper in a booth near the back, across from another booth where four farmers were lingering over cups of coffee. Otherwise, the café was empty.

“Did you hear about what happened in Black River?” Harry asked me, leaning close over the counter and lowering his voice. I said I hadn’t. “The council tried to stop the Hutterites from getting any bigger or starting another colony in their municipality. They passed some bylaws that would keep them from building on any new quarters of land they bought, so nobody could live on that land. Stopped ‘em cold. But the Hutterites went to court and the news just came out today. They beat ‘em. Unconstitutional, the court said.” He sighed. “To tell the truth, they don’t bother me none.”

“Funny they wouldn’t want them around,” I said. “I heard they’re good neighbours, that they’ll go help anybody who’s in trouble.”

“Oh, yeah,” Harry said, still keeping his voice down. Benjamin and his companion came and paid their bill and left. Harry came back from the till and leaned on the counter beside me again. “They roll onto the place with their big equipment and all that help and they have that whole damn place seeded or combined by noon. It’s really something to see.” There was a roar of laughter from the booth where the farmers were sitting. One of them,
still laughing, stood up, a toothpick in his mouth and his bill rolled in one big brown hand. He came up to the cash register.

“What’s the joke, Dave?” Harry asked as he accepted the man’s quarters.

“I was telling ‘em about old Ben. He came up to me on the street in Mallard the other day. He was all upset. Saw a sign that said there was strippers dancing in the bar there.” He had to stop talking for a minute because he had begun to laugh again. He shifted his toothpick. “So I said, ‘What? Naked women dancing? It can’t be true!’ I get a kick out of teasing them Hutterites,” he explained. “Especially old Ben, he’s so serious. So Ben said, ‘It’s true, you see?’ He was shaking his head he was so shocked. ‘It’s crazy,’ he said. So I said, ‘Ah, I don’t believe it.’ And I took his arm, pretended I was going to get him to come with me to see. I said, ‘It can’t be! Come on, let’s go see!’ “ He had to stop again to get control of his laughter. “But old Ben, he took me serious. ‘No! No!’ he says, and he pulls his arm away. ‘I ain’t going over there! It’s crazy!’ Christ,” the farmer said, “I couldn’t stop laughing.” He went out of the café shaking his head and chuckling.

I paid for my coffee and walked slowly home through the soft summer twilight. There was nobody on the street or in the yards, everyone had gone indoors, and lights splashed out across the sidewalk now and then, from rooms where families sat talking or watching
tv
. I thought of the life I had left behind, and I was overcome by a longing for my old apartment in the city, for my friends and our familiar haunts, for the busy, full life we led, for the laughter we shared, and the talk, and the love.

When I got home, instead of going straight to bed, I went into my study. I turned on the desk lamp and sat down not really intending to work, but not yet ready to go to bed either. There was a passage, though, that I hadn’t been able to turn to my satisfaction,
that was what had driven me out to the café, and I picked up that page again and looked at it. I began to cross out phrases and re-write them in the space above the line of type. Slowly the futility of what I was doing swept over me and I tore up the page and threw it down.

It was no good. For months now I’d been wrestling with this book, fighting to keep it true to the concept I’d developed in the city. I’d twisted passages and ideas, I’d compromised, I’d left in what I couldn’t bring myself to leave out even though I knew it didn’t quite belong.

And now I knew it was no good, it didn’t work, in my desperation to match my first success I’d been kidding myself. Would I ever again write anything that was worth reading? Was what I had accomplished so far worth what everyone said? At this moment it seemed of little consequence, and all the world of art, of great achievements, lay spread out ahead of me, on the other side of a transparent wall that I knew I had not yet even breached. Perhaps, I never would. If I had been chosen, as I had believed, it was not in the simple-minded way I had thought, and the prize I had won meant nothing.

I moved to my armchair and fell into it. My eyes lit on the stained patch on the wall, high up, that spilled over onto the ceiling. I had tried everything to remove it, but it had resisted every effort, and now it was coming through the water-base paint I had applied over it.

I remembered then how the writer whose home this had once been, had written in an autobiographical essay about that very stain, how it had come to be there as a result of a chemistry experiment he had tried as a boy, that had exploded. And I knew then that my vision, or my revelation, or whatever I might choose to call it, had come from that dead writer. And I felt, with
a certainty that settled in my bones, that this was why I had come here. And I was filled with dread, and an overwhelming sense of the implacability of my fate.

I sat in the armchair in the shadowed corner of the room and sweat broke out on my forehead and ran down my backbone. To stay here for the rest of my life, to struggle day after day alone, with nothing but the hills and the wind for company. I can’t do it, I said, over and over again. I can’t do it. I won’t, I won’t do it. There has to be an easier way. And then, I can leave if I want to. I can leave.

When I had calmed myself I went upstairs to my bed and escaped into sleep.

In the morning I woke late to the ringing of the phone. I stumbled downstairs to my study to answer it and stood in a patch of sunlight spilling in from the hall that faced the east while I talked. It was Will, phoning from the city to say that he and Cheryl had gotten up this morning and decided, without any warning, that today was the day they would drive down to see me.

“Fine,” I said, heavily. And then, with a little surge of pleasure, “Fine,” for I had remembered what had happened the night before and I felt wholly lost, as if the floor could no longer be trusted to hold me, or the entire house might float away, like a hot air balloon that had lost its anchor.