Fever (9 page)

Later in the day I was vacuuming when I felt somebody was in the room with me. Turning, I saw Palma McCallum standing in the doorway. I hadn’t bothered to turn the key in the lock.

“Hi,” she said, and then, a little timidly, “Are you working?”

“Just housework,” I said. “Want some coffee?”

“I’ll just put the kettle on for tea,” she said, and disappeared toward the kitchen. I pushed the vacuum cleaner out of the way and followed her. “Thurman and I are going to visit his sister in the city,” she said, over her shoulder, as she ran water into the
kettle. “I had a few minutes while he’s out checking things at the farm. I thought I’d drop over and see if we can pick anything up for you.”

“No,” I said, “I don’t need anything, but it was nice of you to ask.”

“What’s a neighbour for,” she said, taking my teapot out of the cupboard and setting it on the counter. “You got any cream?”

“Cream!” I said, “Where would I get good farm cream?”

“Darn! I got some from the Hutterites that’ll just go bad when I’m away. I was going to bring it over.”

“I’m having some friends come from the city later today,” I said. “They’ll be staying a couple of days.”

“And I’m going to miss them!” she wailed. For one awful moment I thought she might try to persuade Thurman to postpone their trip.

“You wouldn’t like them,” I said. “They’re trendy city folk.” “I might like them a lot,” she replied indignantly, so that I had to laugh.

Cheryl and Will arrived about five o’clock. I was watering the front lawn when they drove up in their big, old seventies Ford. I hurried to turn the hose off while Will got slowly out of the driver’s seat, untangling his long legs, and stretched luxuriously. Cheryl jumped out, and before I could say hello, called, “Wow! This must be the ends of the earth! We’ve been driving for hours!”

She hugged me, brushing my cheek with her lips, my nose in her hair, and I smelled that good, womanly smell, perfume or whatever, that I hadn’t smelled for what suddenly seemed an eternity. Will came around the car and we slapped each other on the shoulders and shook hands.

Later, when I served the whipped cream on the saskatoon pie
that Palma had claimed was only going to waste in her freezer, they were ecstatic.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. “It’s like mayonnaise.”

“Why can’t we get cream like this in the city?” Cheryl asked. “Where does it all go?”

“I guess this is one advantage to living in the country,” I said.

After dinner we went for a long walk through the town, up one street and down another, while people in their yards stared at us or said hello.

“Can we walk out there?” Cheryl asked, pointing across the river to the hills. So I took them across the footbridge and out onto the prairie, and eventually, up into the coulee where not long before I had found the partially uncovered skeleton of a dinosaur.

“How did you find it?” Cheryl asked, kneeling and gently brushing away the earth from around it. I remembered that she knew a little about archaeology. I wondered if that included old bones, or was it just cities?

“Pure luck,” I said. “I was out walking and I just happened to spot what I thought was an unusual colour of rock. It must have just been eroded out because it was still white and chalky to touch.”

“That’s absolutely incredible,” she said. “All the people who must come out here and you’re the one to find it. I can hardly believe it.”

“How long ago was that?” Will asked. He was kneeling too, bending to study the piece of exposed bone. “Aren’t you going to do anything about it? I mean, phone the Museum of Natural History or the University?” I shrugged, then knelt too, a little embarrassed.

“Oh, yeah, eventually,” I said.

“Why don’t you take these little pieces home?” Cheryl asked.

She held something in her palm and blew gently on it. “I think this is a tooth, or a part of one.”

“Maybe I will,” I said vaguely, but I didn’t touch the piece she held. She set it down again and brushed a little dirt over it.

It was growing dark, but there was a gold half-moon riding the hills to the south. Cheryl gave me a puzzled look, then stood up, brushing her hands on her jeans.

We sat in my living room drinking scotch. After a while Cheryl stood up and said, “All this good country air is making me sleepy. I think I’ll go to bed.” She yawned and stretched, unconscious of how desirable she looked with her round breasts pushed against the light cloth of her shirt. I had to drop my eyes before Will noticed me looking at her.

When she had gone, Will said, “So, this is where the great old man lived.” Will taught English Lit. at the university, specializing in modern American. Come to think of it, I was surprised he hadn’t come before. “It’s not much, is it,” he said, “to have produced a genius.”

“They were poor people,” I said. “But I think the house must have been comfortable enough, especially when it was new.”

“Have you had any visitations?” Will asked, grinning.

“Not exactly,” I said. “I mean, there haven’t been any manifestations or any weird noises in the night, if that’s what you mean.” He raised his eyebrows questioningly and waited for me to continue, but I felt I didn’t want to talk about it, at least, not yet.

We talked about people we knew in the city, about what was going on in the publishing world, about Will and Cheryl’s plans to spend Will’s sabbatical travelling in Europe.

“Louise had a one woman show at the campus gallery,” he remarked, not looking at me.

“Oh?” I said.’ “ Has she made any progress from that series of dances or whatever it was she was doing?”

“I didn’t think so,” he said. “The show was a disappointment, I think that was the general opinion.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. Her long back turned to me in the dim light of the bedroom, her dark hair falling over her shoulders.

“How’s your writing going?” Will asked softly, and I could hear in his voice how long he had been waiting to ask me that.

“It isn’t going very well,” I said. It had cost me something to say that, but Will was, after all, my oldest friend, the one who had encouraged me most in my desire to write, who had stood by when nobody would publish me, and who hadn’t deserted me when I went off the rails after the prize. “It keeps changing on me,” I said.

Will set his drink down and leaned back, staring up at the ceiling.

“How?” he asked.

“I set out to do one thing and it slipped away from me. It turned into something else.” I wasn’t sure anymore that this was the problem, but I didn’t know what else to say. “It … I’ve … lost my way, at least, I’ve lost the old way, and I’m not sure what the new way is, or if there’s a new way.” There was a long silence while both of us thought about this. “I mean, I think I’m, maybe, just at the beginning of something new but it’s not what I was doing before.”

“Maybe what you’re doing now is better,” Will said slowly.

“Better?” I thought about this. “Are you trying to tell me you didn’t like my first novel?” He glanced at me, then quickly looked away, and I realized that he hadn’t.

“No,” he said carefully, “that’s not necessarily what I meant.

But you must have known you couldn’t keep doing that forever.”

“I wasn’t planning to,” I said, annoyed. But of course I was.

“I know there’s a tremendous amount of pressure on a writer, once he’s had a success, to duplicate it the second time.”

I thought of how sweat actually broke out on the back of my neck and how my stomach tightened whenever I thought of how the critics who had so praised my first book, would meet my second. I shuddered. A coyote far out in the hills behind the house had begun to yip, and a wind had risen. We could hear it blowing softly around the eaves and through the open windows of the house. I began to tell him how my life was, in this house, and what had happened to me the night before in my study.

“No wonder your work is changing,” he said. “But what does it mean?”

“It means that I wasn’t a writer before,” I said. “I think it means I had to undergo some kind of … profound change … before I could go on.” I shook my head, then fell silent. I could hear the papers in my study scattering across the floor as the wind grew stronger. Let them blow, I thought.

“You’ll be coming back to the city then?” Will asked.

The next day we went for a longer walk in the hills, this time carrying with us a few sandwiches and a bottle of wine that Cheryl and Will had brought. When we were far from the town, or any signs of civilization, we sat down on a grassy hillside and enjoyed the sun and the breeze and the scent of sage that was on the air all around us. Watching Cheryl lying on her back in the grass, one arm thrown across her eyes to shield them from the sun and her blonde hair spread out around her head, I thought again of Louise, and regret swept through me.

“By the way,” Cheryl said, taking her arm down, “that thing Louise had going with Bob Stewart is over.”

“They were always fighting,” Will said. “It was downright funny.” Cheryl rolled over onto her stomach and grew silent, looking up at me where I sat above her on the hillside.

“Are you happy here?”

“I’m not unhappy,” I said.

“Isn’t it awfully lonely?” she asked.

“I only started to get lonely lately,” I told her. “I swear I wasn’t before.”

“Nobody’s even seen you for four or five months.”

“I’ve been to the city a few times,” I admitted. “But I didn’t go to Saskatoon. And I had to fly to Toronto for a few days last month. I haven’t been here the whole time.”

“Just avoiding your friends, eh,” Cheryl said, laughing.

“No,” I said. “I was avoiding something else.”

“The scene of the crime,” Will said.

We decided to have supper in the café, which, for a change, was more than half-full when we arrived. We found an empty booth next to the row of stools at the counter and Harry came over to say hello, then left us to go back to ‘chewing the fat’ as he put it, with a couple of farmers in a back booth. Benjamin, the old Hutterite, was there, too, with a different companion, this one a tall, skinny twenty-year old in a black suit that was too short in the sleeves. They were eating supper in their usual booth near the back.

“This food isn’t bad,” Cheryl said, as we began to eat. “Do you eat here often?” Will asked.

“No,” I said, “hardly ever, but I come down occasionally for a cup of coffee in the evening.” The waitress came back and refilled
our cups. The café had begun to empty and it was growing dark outside. Cheryl and Will were planning to leave in the morning.

We were sitting silently, each of us thinking our own thoughts, when Will suddenly glanced up and I realized someone was standing beside me, leaning against the low partition that separated our booth from the aisle and the row of stools on the other side. It was Benjamin.

“Hello, George,” he said. “You got visitors.”

“Yes,” I said, and introduced Cheryl and Will to him. His companion passed him, paid the bill, and went outside.

“You’re in town late,” I said.

“We …” he began, and was cut off abruptly, pushing almost over the partition into our booth. His hat fell off and tumbled up against Will’s coffee cup. Somebody passing by had bumped into him so hard that he had been knocked almost off his feet. I could see by his expression and the way he was holding his upper arm that the collision had hurt him. We all realized at the same time that it had been deliberate. In the confusion, heads turning, voices raised, I looked from Benjamin to the young farmer who was walking fast toward the door. I saw him look back over his shoulder at Ben; I saw he was grinning, and there was a light shining in his pale eyes that was ugly to see.

“He did that on purpose!” Cheryl said, and then to Benjamin, “Are you hurt?”

“No, no,” Benjamin said, reaching out to take his hat back from Will. He looked toward the door, but the farmer was gone. Suddenly Harry was there.

“He’s drunk again,” he said to us. He turned to Benjamin. “You know what Ernie’s like when he’s drinking. Don’t pay any attention to him.” Benjamin shakily set his hat back on his head, but didn’t answer Harry.

“To do that to an old man!” Will said, his voice filled with
disgust, and there were murmurs from people sitting near us.

“That Ernie, he goes too far,” Harry said. “He’ll wind up in jail yet.” The shocked voices around the café were dying down now as people turned back to their meals.

“I … I go find Joseph,” Benjamin mumbled, ignoring our questions, and walked away, a slow, shuffling walk, not at all the way he usually moved.

“Somebody should call the police!” Cheryl said in a loud, indignant voice.

“Shsh,” Will hushed her.

“Do you think there’s anything we should do?” I asked Harry. The way Benjamin had walked away, the look on his face, as though he was lost or in shock. But, I thought, probably Benjamin and Joseph are in the van by now, pulling out of town, on their way back to the colony. Harry shrugged and turned to watch the closed door as if it might have the answer written on it.

“Do you know that Ernie?” Will asked me.

“He’s in here a lot or in the bar,” I said. “I don’t know him.”

“Let’s go,” Cheryl said, in a low, choked voice, pushing her half-full cup away. Her cheeks were flushed and she wasn’t looking at Will or me. We rose hastily, following her, paid the bill, and went outside into the summer night.

Benjamin was standing alone in the middle of the sidewalk, peering down the street, first one way and then the other. A couple of men stood in the shadows along the wall of the café.

“Are you okay, Benjamin?” I asked.

“I don’t know where van is,” he said, in a frightened voice. Will was the first to take in the situation.

“I’ll run and get my car,” he offered in a firm voice. “It won’t take me five minutes, and if we can’t find your friend, I’ll drive you home.” He started to sprint away in the direction of my house. I turned to the men standing by the wall.

“Do you know why Joseph left without Ben?” I asked. “Did he say anything?”

One of the men came forward into the light thrown through the door of the café and I saw that it was Martin Gutwin, a family man not often in the café.