The Age of Cities (13 page)

The parade closed with another flatbed truck, for Anglo-Am Cedar Products. On it, a clutch of men stood in front of a cedar shake hut; holding chainsaws and shake-splitting axes, they stared down at the thick line of people along the curb with cold eyes and expressionless faces.

Once the Anglo-Am men had passed, the freed spectators milled on 1st Avenue, amused to annex a territory ordinarily reserved for automobiles. Watching the miscellany of townsfolk, Winston was struck by the memory of Dickie asking him about his
fetching get-up
as though he'd recently arrived from a dustbowl Okie settlement with a piece of straw stuck between his teeth. The nerve of that man! What authority did he have? Winston had read enough literature to understand that city sophistication had long been pitted against country simplicity. Indeed, for eons, their faults and strengths had been simplified and exaggerated, so that they became flattened symbols, cartoons no different from those preposterous professional wrestlers, The Strangler and Mr. Marvelous, evil and good; as though any matter could be so cut and dried.

Winston imagined that for certified city dwellers such as Dickie and company, ridiculing country ways might be as habitual a response as taunting was to Alberta upon seeing a jumpy travelling salesman at the door. That attitude must be merited, after all: the country bumpkin was a universal figure of fun. And he felt such disdain from time to time. Likewise, he supposed that Delilah Pierce would venture
cynical, superficial,
and
cruel
if she'd spent an hour or two with the gang at the Bamboo Terrace. She wouldn't be wholly in error, either.

Winston squinted his eyes, imagining he could see the essence of the woman walking before him. His vision blurred and he bumped into the man next to him.

“Pardon me,” he said, “this is some crowd.” The man nodded. Winston thought the stranger had likely come to the Bend for the derby.

He directed his attention to his mother and Doc Carter, whose youthful feet had moved them a few paces ahead. Winston squinted again for a moment. It was hopeless; there was no single property that defined those two as
belonging
here. And if he looked at himself with objective eyes, he was certain he'd encounter a bubbling stew of properties, each of which might be considered a country or city attribute. That would be the same for each and every man, woman, and child on 1st Avenue.

“Winston, you're dilly-dallying,” Alberta said, breaking him from his reverie. “Come join us so that we can find a good view at the bandstand.” She clapped her hands together. “Chop chop.”

The band onstage was a quartet that featured a plain chestnut-haired woman dressed in a strawberry print calico who could belt out a tune. She sang a pair of mournful ballads about love—won then lost—before turning the stage over to the musicians. They broke out with a polka for the nimble-footed.

Alberta stood between Doc Carter and Winston. She pointed across the still sparsely populated field of dancers—farmers and their wives in their Sunday best were always the first to cut a rug—so that her companions could not help but see her precise target.

“There's Delilah Pierce. Look how she's swaying. I had no idea she was such a romantic.”

“Yes, Mother, that's Delilah.”

“She'd appreciate your asking her to dance, I'll bet.”

“From one of the town's eligible bachelors, no less, a true honour,” Doc Carter chimed in with a smirk.

“The bachelor librarian and the widowed Social Studies teacher. Now there's a picture. That'll get tongues wagging, you know.” Winston could feel himself being corralled by decorum.

“Let them wag. What's the harm? You two are a tad old for a shotgun wedding, anyway.” She smiled at her impertinence.

“Perhaps you're right, Mother. What's one dance, after all?”

Doc Carter joined in with their patter. “And one good turn deserves another, madame. Will you do me the honour?” He bowed slightly, the gesture's sincerity flecked with mockery.

“I will gladly partake when they play the next waltz. That polka is a tad quick for these old pegs, though.” She gave her thigh a slap.

“Very well. I'm going to fetch us some punch. Would you like strawberry? Or perhaps strawberry?”

“I'll take strawberry, please.”

“Winston?”

“I'm fine, Doc, but thank you for asking.”

Doc Carter turned toward the refreshment booth next to the stage and walked along the unmarked line that separated the dancers from the spectators.

“Well, Mother, it's my turn to brave the crowd.” Winston nodded at Alberta and started toward Delilah Pierce.

O[ctober 19]59

As he approached the house—its glass-flecked stucco dappled by fluttery cottonwood leaf shade—Winston reminded himself to drag the garden hose to the hydrangeas that stood like wilting regimental guards on each side of the Manor's front steps. This Indian summer was taking its toll. He walked to the side gate to check in on Alberta. At this time of the year, he'd complained to her, she practically lived out of doors. It was no surprise now to find her hunched over like a seasoned strawberry picker in what she called her vegetable patch. Winston preferred to think of it as the acreage.

In past seasons, she'd joked that she had no choice, that the garden demanded its
Lebensraum
and that she was powerless, the hapless instrument of its infernal design. Now, with the exception of a rectangular strip of lawn running alongside the house, vegetables, herbs, and flowers sprouted everywhere, coaxed into the peculiar shapes and alliances by Alberta's singular logic—marigolds running in parallel rows with carrots; zinnias and tomatoes intermixed promiscuously, all bordered by purple-leafed sage; towering hollyhocks with cucumbers sprawled at their heels; weedy dill competing with fronds of overgrown asparagus dotted with red berries; beauty pageant contestant dahlias left by themselves to proclaim their poise and beauty.

She had set out three leathery zucchinis, tough parcels of crocodile green that would soon be rendered into something or other and sealed in jars they would be eating from throughout the stretch of winter months. Treading closer, Winston noticed that next to them sat the day's culls: runty beets, fibrous end of season yellow beans, scabby and scarred tomatoes. They could be pickled or stewed, he knew from experience. Alberta was a firm proponent of “waste not, want not” well after the Depression's scarcity years. She might have faith in progress, but she'd seen enough to suspect that a giant step backward was not an unreasonable expectation.

“Well, if there was a God, October would prove it. Hello, Mother. Another glorious day. How's life in the patch?” Winston lowered the register of his voice when he spoke to her from the distance. Alberta's hearing was not what it had been, she reminded him now and again. She'd accepted it as another sign of creeping senility—inevitable, unavoidable, a fact of nature—and couldn't be bothered to go to the ear man Doc Carter had recommended. Why bother?

This young fellow over in Clear Brook could fit her with a space-age hearing aid, Doc Carter let her know whenever they ran into one another, foxy and persistent in the face of her baffling indifference. Unless, of course, her ears were just stopped up with wax: last week he'd offered to
take a look-see
right there on the sidewalk as people filed by them on 1st Avenue. “It's not, er, unheard of,” he had said, apologetic about the stillborn pun, before he proceeded with an anecdote, one of scores Alberta suspected he always kept nearby and handy as cod liver oil. She'd told Winston that the doctor's philosophy of medical advice appeared to be “Why not store up examples of mishaps like preserves in a larder?” After he'd spun out the harrowing tale, Alberta had politely refused his offer of an expert examination. Secure at home, she'd related the embarrassing episode to Winston as well as the lesson-filled story the doctor had leveled at her.

Doc Carter was a man fond of stern finger-wagging and precautionary tales about the dear prices thoughtless patients paid for
not taking care of the basics
. The underlying premise was that things are worse than they appear; thus, in his blood-soaked stories, a stubbed toe became an open invitation to gangrene and a scratched mosquito's bite metamorphosed into the royal road to blood poisoning. Carnage around every corner. “An ounce of prevention…,” he'd announce with little provocation.

Winston and Alberta had spoken about the Doc's blood-spilling vignettes of fatal carelessness and decided he made them up to order; they were too plentiful and they always seemed perfectly cut to fit the particular circumstance. Could there truly have been such witless men—mesmerized by overheated engines, whirring fans, and shake-dulled axes—and so large a collection of missing fingers, toes, and ears? Still, the whiff of Old Testament reprimand from the mount did make the stories a thrill. Winston saw that Doc Carter would make a terrific instructor for the Family Life Education unit. Affable, yet impartial and stern.

It was no accident that, years ago, Doc Carter had been put in charge of delivering the personal hygiene lecture to the enlisted men of the district—young and old alike—before their train trip to the recruitment centre in the city. Depending on where the greenhorn soldiers were destined, he would open with, “Men, there's more to France than can-can girls,” or else, “Men, there's more to England than trifle.” Though he'd also reserved, “Men, there's more to Japan than geisha girls,” he'd never had the chance to use it. Polishing his gold-rimmed spectacles with a pressed white hankie, he'd spoken calmly and about practical considerations right after he had shown the short
Educational Program
made by the Government of Canada, its single reel shared, worn down, and splintered by the municipalities of the Valley. He was proud of his contribution to the war effort and, Winston had heard often enough, he found clever ways to pull it into unrelated conversations.

When that fragile celluloid strip didn't fracture and demand one stop-gap repair after another, the federal government's lesson was fourteen minutes of shock tactics that nevertheless incited hoots of merriment and skittish laughter each time Doc Carter clicked on the projector. In it, an elderly scientist with heavy black glasses and a head of wiry grey hair wrote Latin words and their more commonly known synonyms—
Clap, Morning Drop, Dose
—on a portable blackboard and occasionally tugged on his laboratory coat. His lecture faded and was replaced by the view of a camera seemingly set up in the middle of a military doctor's office. It lingered on the legion of moist and gruesome medical conditions enlisted men had dropped their trousers to reveal. The
pièce de résistance
was a series of brief scenes that depicted conniving women—French, unexpectedly, to judge by their unvarying berets and glasses of red wine—loitering in cafés and taverns. Their glistening painted lips, smoldering eyes, and snug wool skirts could evidently siphon key war strategies from unsuspecting men in mere seconds. After the fifth man had shouted out, “I'd like her to try to outfox me,” Doc had vowed to write a letter to the Ministry of Defense with his ideas for improving the film. He thought they should leave pale with fear and not flushed from
bonhomie
and guffaws.

Feeling reminiscent years later, he had joked to Winston that if he could not prevent men from tasting forbidden fruit, he could make damn sure they understood the importance of taking precautions. He'd never reported his success rate.

Alberta had relayed the pertinent bits of the doctor's tale to Winston and thrown in some commentary of her own. Apparently, this teenaged boy (the scion—unnamed, thank you very much—of a local lumber baron, no less) had made a half-hearted effort to hang himself in the garage. His mother had discovered him before he completed the deed. After bursting into tears and then giving him a scalding, blurred-vision talking to, she had driven her sullen, shame-faced child directly to Doc Carter's office for treatment of the rope burns. She knew full well that Doc, famed for his fire and brimstone medical enthusiasm, would worm his way into the heart of the problem (not that it would take an Ellery Queen to make sense of those angry scarlet welts) and give the young man a stern finger-shaking-mouth-tsk-tsking-head-shaking lecture about responsibility and the unquestionable value of life.

The doctor had in fact discovered a secret the mother's pleading could not: the entire problem stemmed from two plugs of wax, each one no larger than a click beetle. The boy's personal hygiene could not be called fastidious, it would seem, and his ears had become so blocked with the amber paste that his hearing began to suffer. He thought it was the end of the world. “The very idea,” Alberta had interjected. “It's ludicrous.” Impetuous and self-important (he was a rebellious and pig-headed sixteen-year-old and the eldest son of local wealth, and he had taken the town aristocrat role to heart), this scamp had decided that death would be preferable to the ignobility of being deaf. “Imagine dying for something so inconsequential, so simple to remedy,” the doctor had said pointedly to Alberta, making the parable's message so plain that even a half-wit would understand.

With imploring eyebrows raised high, Winston had agreed that the doctor was well intended and his concern worth at least taking into consideration.

Alberta had replied impatiently, “Yes, you're right, he was, but I'd know it if ear wax was really my problem.”

This late afternoon, Alberta wore her broad-rimmed straw hat and the one-of-a-kind calico gardening apron she'd sewn that had as many pockets and flaps as a fisherman's vest. Surrounded by a dense thicket of staked tomato plants, she gave him a harried clerk's Sir-I'll-be-with-you-in-a-moment wave. Winston admitted that his interest in gardening was dilettantish compared with his mother's. It was a happy arrangement. He was content to dabble in his quadrant and produce a handful of perfect striking blooms every season. Besides, he didn't have the spare hours for upkeep; a garden so expansive would be as demanding as raising a child, he imagined. Alberta had told him countless times over the years that the secret of her gardening success was “getting right in there.”