Once We Had a Country (5 page)

“Keep a close eye on her outside,” says Brid. “The orchard’s a minefield.”

“What do you mean?” asks Maggie.

“You’ll see.”

The air is wet and heavy as Maggie and Pauline cross the back lawn. In the dank outhouse Maggie sits, trying to imagine she’s alone, while Pauline waits on the other side of the door. Finally, Maggie gives up and the two of them make their way farther from the house, until they reach a
low, flat building with small windows and a tin roof. The door’s locked, and the interior’s too dark to reveal itself through the glass. Past it, the cherry orchard begins, the trees looking stunted and unkempt.

On the horizon are low hills crested by radio towers, two of them close together, a third off to the right, either smaller or more distant, she isn’t sure. The land is more lushly vegetative than in Boston, and when the sun pushes through the leaves, Maggie feels something rise in her—not contentment, it’s too giddy and unsettling; more like a charge of possibility. It’s what she felt near the end of April at Fletcher’s place, that night he first described the farm to her after checking it out. Finally, she realized, she had a proper reason not to join her father in Laos as he wanted. Ever since Christmas he’d been needling her about her complacency, asking her why she didn’t want to see the world and make a difference to people’s lives. Now she could tell him she was going to do just that, only with Fletcher instead of him.

As they enter the rows of trees, there’s the sound of an engine firing up. When she turns to identify the source, for the first time she notices the fence of corrugated metal eight feet high that runs along one side of the orchard. Piled behind it are the bodies of crushed cars. Somehow, Fletcher forgot to mention that the farm is next to a wrecking yard. A bit farther on, Maggie sees what Brid meant about keeping a close eye: the ground beneath the trees is strewn with automobile parts. There are rear-view mirrors, hubcaps, and tumbleweeds of electrical wire. What force of wind could have carried them here? Maggie begins to pick up the detritus, gathering it into a pile, and Pauline
joins her, pleased by the impromptu treasure hunt. Once they have accumulated a small heap, Maggie realizes she wants to film it in the same way she filmed the bedroom.

“Let’s go back to the house,” she announces. “I have a game we can play.”

Pauline deigns to take her hand again, and they head off in the direction they came. When they arrive at the bedroom upstairs, Maggie removes the camera from its bag.

“It makes pictures,” she explains. “You know, like with television?”

Pauline looks doubtful and reaches to take the device from her, but Maggie lifts it away. “No, not a toy. Only grown-ups can use it. You know what, though? We’ll make pictures of you. I’ll be the director and you can be the movie star. Would you like that?”

Pauline seems unsure. When Maggie points the camera at her to demonstrate what she means, the girl hides her face with her hands.

“Later we can show the film to Mommy. Won’t that be fun?” Pauline peeks out from between her fingers. “Here’s what I’ll say,” Maggie tells her. “
Lights … camera … action.”

At the beginning the screen is dark. Then two title cards appear in sequence, crayoned letters on buff cardboard.

PAULINE GARLAND AND MAGGIE DUNNE
PROUDLY PRESENT …

 … A TOUR OF HARROWAY ORCHARDS
.

The second card is pulled back to reveal the living room with the peace sign on the wall. Pauline starts to enter the frame but is restrained by Maggie’s free hand, which proceeds to move aside an armchair even while she continues to film. On the floor behind the chair is a mound of chewed-up foam. A close-up of the couch shows cigarette burns on the upholstery.

The dining room is next, empty save for a few lawn chairs and a plank lying flat across two sawhorses. Then there’s the bathroom with its wallpaper coming off in strips. Pauline steps toward the toilet, lifts the lid, and pulls a face. After that the film cuts to the exterior and shots of car parts in the orchard, followed by one of the outhouse. Its door opens and Pauline emerges holding her nose, pretending to cry. In the left side of the frame a small snake flashes emerald and disappears into the grass.

Another shot studies the low building on the orchard’s edge. The camera advances and Pauline runs ahead to the door. Inside is a long room with a lone bare bulb dangling from a cord. Fletcher lies on a bench in the corner with his shirt off. His face is red and puffing, and he arches his back as he pumps a bar across his chest. When he sees the camera, he sets down the bar and gestures with delight to a set of dumbbells on the floor nearby, showing off what he has found. In the next shot he’s helping Pauline to lift a dumbbell high above her head.

Back in the house, Pauline stands behind another title card that reads
OTHER THINGS THE LAST PEOPLE LEFT BEHIND
. It’s followed by a series of shots in which she presents items to the camera: a furry vermilion slipper,
a half-empty bottle of champagne, the box for a jigsaw puzzle of a Florentine villa. Lastly, she approaches with something in her palm. This time she’s crying for real. Maggie’s hand reaches from behind the camera, and into it Pauline drops the corpse of a small bird. The hand pulls away, reflexively letting the creature fall. The camera’s eye descends too, remaining focused on the body. Then it trails Pauline down the hall into an empty bedroom with boggish green walls. Still sobbing, the girl points to three more birds lying stiff on the windowsill, sparrows broken from beating themselves against the glass, two of them curled within themselves, the wings of the other extended as if in flight. There’s a shot of Pauline wiping her eyes, Maggie reaching with her free hand to stop her, then leading her to the bathroom. Pauline looks up to the camera as if taking instructions, steps onto a stool beside the sink, and begins to wash.

H
idden in the undergrowth, Gordon watches the riverbank. A rubber dinghy with an outboard motor lies pulled up on the shore, several sets of footprints leading away from it in the brown clay. Nearby stand a pair of men, both Lao, not much more than boys, rifles hanging from their necks. One of them keeps wiping his nose with the back of his hand while kicking a pebble back and forth between his feet. The other stares in all directions with hard eyes and snaps at his companion upon noticing his inattention. The man makes a show of standing alert, then takes up kicking another pebble. In the river, a dozen women have waded up to their waists and are washing clothes, laughing with one another as if the men’s presence is no more remarkable than the drops of rain spreading ripples on the water. The
only suggestion of anything unusual is the jitter in the women’s voices.

A few feet from where Gordon crouches, a Hmong girl of sixteen or seventeen sits on the bank holding Yia Pao’s little boy. The baby is asleep, swaddled in a beige blanket. Gordon trembles as his eyes dart between the child and the guards by the boat.

After a time, the man with the hard eyes says something to the girl. His tone is jeering, and she looks up for a moment before dropping her gaze. He speaks to her again, louder this time. The girl sets the child down and stands, takes a hesitant step toward the guard. He speaks more sharply and she takes a few more steps, hands clutching the band of cloth tied around her hips. The women in the water have fallen silent and stopped their work. The other guard speaks to the girl now too, laughing and gesturing for her to come closer. When she doesn’t move, he barks at her impatiently. Then an old woman in the river, gaunt and hunched, calls out to rebuke him. The man smiles and turns. The women stiffen as he puts his hand on the butt of his rifle.

A second later, the girl shrieks. The women’s gaze shifts back to her, and the guards wheel. She points to the place where she was sitting. The baby is no longer there.

When the girl starts for the trees, the hard-eyed guard cries out an order and she halts. The men turn back to train their rifles on the women, as if they’re suspected of some ruse. The old woman pleads, but the hard-eyed guard shakes his head, and the women draw closer together. He fires once into the air, then sits down on the side of
the dinghy to light a cigarette, and everyone waits for the return of the other armed men who arrived with him.

The first shot is of Brid on the couch. She’s wearing a bikini, the freckles pronounced across her tanned shoulders, while on the soundtrack Pauline can be heard having a conversation with her doll. She sits at her mother’s feet, and occasionally the top of her head appears in the frame. As Brid speaks, she keeps her eyes fixed upon her daughter.

“So what do you want me to say?”

“Start with why you came up here,” replies Maggie, off-screen.

“Hmm. Well, my family disowned me, and then the co-op shut down, so I was out of work. I thought it might be nice to take a ride on Fletcher’s tab awhile.”

“His father’s tab,” corrects Maggie’s voice.

“There was also Wale. If he ever gets here, it’ll be a safe place for him. Mostly, though, I did it for Pauline. I don’t want her living in the States. Before she came along, I was idealistic. I organized, I chanted, I threw bottles at cops. I even called my little kleptomaniac phase an anti-capitalist gesture. Then I turned into a mommy and realized that if some pig cracked my skull open, I was dying for two, you know? The question became, what’s best for my little girl?” The camera jounces and moves in on her face. “I used to say breeders are nuts, but now things that seemed corny to me, things like devotion and sacrifice, are just everyday facts.” She laughs. “Wait till you’ve had a
kid latched onto those boobs, you’ll see. You’re not on the pill, are you? You know they invented it to let men fuck women whenever they want, right? Anyhow, I thought the pill was illegal for Catholics.”

“I know you don’t like Christians—” says Maggie.

“Oh, Catholics are different. You worship a chick. I dig that.” Brid laughs again, then grows sombre. “To be honest, I don’t think in terms of liking or disliking people. It’s more a matter of not letting their neuroses increase my craziness.”

In the next scene, Fletcher is lying on his back against the kitchen floor. The camera pulls away to reveal Pauline standing next to him in a pink swimsuit with a ruffle around the waist. At some unseen cue he lays his hands against his chest, palms up, and she steps onto them. His fingers curl around her little feet, her arms go out to balance, and slowly he lifts her until she’s suspended in the air, shrieking with pleasure at her ability to manage this feat. Brid sits at the table without her sunglasses, bleary-eyed, clapping duly, but afterward shifting her attention to an unseen place beyond the kitchen window. Finally she turns to confront the lens. A flash of irritation changes to something that could be taken for tenderness, before she resumes her vigil over the girl and man at play.

The letter is the sole piece of correspondence in the mailbox when Maggie checks. At the sight of her name on the envelope in the distinctive characters of her grandmother’s typewriter, a jangling current of anxiety starts through
her. In the orchard, she lies down among the daisies and Queen Anne’s lace to read what’s inside.