Things Withered (31 page)

Hazel kind of hated that dog. More than once she’d knocked on their door, complaining about their dog.
Obedience school
was her stern advice. Obedience school.

Sometime after Terry’s baby had been born, the disturbing little dog went missing.

It was a Monday, I think, because it seemed to me it was the night all of us usually went to the library, me and the boys.

As the boys and I were on our way out the door, the two adorable little girls from next door came up the walk with their mother, asking if we’d seen their little dog. The younger one had clearly been crying, and her sister seemed on the verge of it. They had been looking since after school. It seemed the dog might have gotten out of the house unnoticed.

The mother looked downright stricken. I remember meeting her eyes. I guessed mom might have had a distracting day, thinking groceries, lessons after school, what’s for supper, anything but yappy dogs sneaking out between your legs and taking off down the street. It would have looked like a shadow. A blink of god’s eye.

He’ll turn up
, I told her sympathetically.
I’m sure everyone will keep an eye out.

She nodded hopefully and said it hadn’t been so very long. If he had gotten out at lunch, he would be getting hungry. Someone would notice him.
He has all the proper identification
, she said. Collar, tags.

I agreed, it was just a matter of time. I volunteered the boys to go and help to look for Peanuts. And they did. We never made it to the library.

They didn’t find the dog that night. They didn’t find the dog until it started to smell and that took weeks because it was only spring and the thaw was slow that year. Cuth found him when he was spring cleaning the yard for his mother. I heard him telling my boys that it took him quite a while to pinpoint where the smell was coming from.

Smelled so bad it seemed like it was coming from everywhere
, he told them.

I knew that. We had a cat die under a pile of lumber once. Terrible cat, a biter and a scratcher. I knew exactly how bad that smelled. Smell can stick to you for days.

Those little girls were devastated. An amateur investigation seemed to imply that the little fellow had been hit by a car in the lane maybe the day he went missing. Hit hard enough that he was thrown over the fence into Hazel’s backyard. Had to be. The gate was always shut at the Kummels’, and because the gate and fence ran all the way to the ground, there seemed no way for the dog to have gotten into the yard unless it was literally thrown high. Knocked airborne.

There was the slight possibility that a driver, having hit the dog, stopped the car, put it in park, got out, saw Peanuts—alive but badly injured—and chose to toss the dog over the fence, assuming maybe, that it lived there, or not caring. That seemed
much
too cruel. Even for a barky dog.

In any case, with what was likely the last of its life, the dog must have crawled under the gazebo and died. A bit of blood and a slight depression in the muddy yard seemed to indicate where he’d hit ground, and how far he’d had to crawl. Not far, really, although he had been quite a small dog.

In retrospect you could see how a person could jump to conclusions, even horrible, unprovable, conclusions.

As far as I knew, Hazel and Terry remained friends. Things went on in a usual fashion and I suppose it was all very good for Hazel, given that she seemed to have limited friendships and family was scarce. Terry and Martin were good for Hazel. And good for them, too, I suspect, since their family also seemed MIA and Hazel was handy for babysitting. For the life of me I can’t think of what they named that baby.

Martin, Terry’s national car rental executive husband, was in fact dropping that baby off at Hazel’s on their way to something or other when the next horrible thing happened.

It didn’t seem possible that
two
horrible things could happen from the same house, but then they did, just the same.

I didn’t see it, myself.

It was early in the morning, and I was in the kitchen making the boys’ breakfast before school, and I can even remember what it was, if only because I spilled half of it when Kerry hollered like a banshee from the front room. Peanut butter pancakes. You have to remember the little things, because they will matter.

Martin had walked over next door, and dropped off their little baby at Hazel’s. He and Terry were off somewhere for the morning. He was dressed up nicely in a sports jacket and tie, casual, not his usual undertaker’s outfit for the car rental place.

Donna Markem from up the street was just saying goodbye to her own husband and happened to see Martin, waving to Hazel, smiling like he didn’t have a care in the world. She told me that she’d just turned to go back inside, when there was the ungodly sound of a gunning engine, wheels screeching on pavement, the grind of metal on metal, glass bursting—

And screaming.

Screaming to no end.

My Kerry just happened to open the front door at that moment, adding his own screech. I was in the kitchen and spilled the pancake batter, running to see what happened to my son.

(At the back of my mind was always that afternoon at Rita’s—the whoosh, the flash of light, the horrible wet sounds that came after—I ran like a demon, truth be told.)

A car, driven by an elderly lady had gone out of control and smashed right into the side of the Jansens’ sedan.

Martin Jansen was nearly cut in half. His legs were badly crushed and of course there was lots of blood. Right after dropping his baby off at Hazel Kummel’s. Like any ordinary day.

He died, of course.

In retrospect, between poor Martin and that little dog—and of course poor, poor Tommy—you can see how these things might lead to speculation.

One afternoon on my way to the store, I passed a group of girls hanging around in the school yard. Singing:

Hazel Kummel’s coming

She’ll get you when you sleep

You’ll die a thousand times

when Hazel Kummel creeps

Poor Cuth. There’s always a price to pay. But he turned out well, in spite of it all.

Children are always the first ones to figure a neighbourhood out. I remember that we had been on Burlington for six years without really making many friends outside the “next doors” on the block—this is mostly due to the natural restrictions of a mother with young children. You can’t very well spend all of your time running up and down the block having coffee
.

Girls maybe not so much, but boys, they explore. The boys get on their bikes and ride all over hell’s half acre and come home with the news; they knew, for instance, about the little dog—Peanuts—before anyone and while it was not part of the story they shared with us, their parents, I imagine that the boys found a nice long, sharp stick and poked at that little dog before they dragged it out from under the gazebo. I imagined that,
they
would hardly say so, of course. Boys get the news, girls interpret it.

Hazel Kummel’s coming.

That’s why I think it was a girl who worked up that rhyme. Boys lose interest. I wouldn’t be surprised if it had been one of the girls who lost their dog, Peanuts. An argument could be made in their favour of course, that it wasn’t really their meanness so much as their grief, and they were really just little girls.

She’ll get you when you sleep/You’ll die a thousand times/when Hazel Kummel creeps.

That rhyme never went away. They might still be singing it now, for all I know. I don’t have small children any more, so I’m not as in touch with these things as I used to be, but I know that they say things. The kids around the neighbourhood still talk to me; I’m always friendly and my family comes around regularly—my successful boys, so handsome and smart. Very smart young men.

Successful.

So sometimes I give a passing child a cookie (this is becoming more risky, since children are no longer supposed to talk to anyone—stranger-danger—living two or three doors away from someone does not even qualify them as an acquaintance). The cookies will grease their wheels as they say, and they’ll tell me things.

There’s a witch lives across the street.

Oh?

She eats pets. Especially the ones you love.

Oh?

She killed a kid once. Cut off his head.

And how could she do that?

Her fingernails are like knives. At night she takes off her mask and her eyes are full of worms and her teeth are fangs she’s a witch—

And when you look into her eyes you can see the abyss. Not in so many words, I guess; but that’s what the kids say.

Hazel did herself no favours by sneaking around, peeking out her window instead of pulling the curtains open and giving people a wave once in a while. She kept her gate locked. She looked sideways at people when they walked by, like she was giving them some kind of evil eye.

Aging was not her friend. Too many years of hunching gave her a stooped-over look that implied a hunch, even if there wasn’t one there. She kept herself indoors and was pale. She kept her hair long, even after it was thinning and had turned, not the nice silver-grey that you see now in photos for Viagra and juicers, but a muddy grey that seemed to have no colour at all.

She would yell at the kids for walking on her grass. She put a hand-lettered sign on her lawn—
Keep Off!
—like a dare.

Eventually the kids would dare each other to go touch her front door.

Hazel Kummel’s coming.

Hag. Crone. Witch. Not like she didn’t have her hand in it.

I talked to her about it once. We still talked. We talk now, although it has taken on a different flavour in the last few years. I have, somehow, less contempt for her and more pity than I ever have before, but I can’t bring myself to like her. Never have been able to and time has not changed that at all. Not since that time in my front yard when she asked about my boys.

Your children. This one and the one on the way. Are they normal?

But I asked once, about ten years ago, when we were both considerably more mobile than we are now, if she didn’t want to go with me down to the seniors’ centre where I dropped in once a week and had a visit, did some reading for folks who couldn’t, dodged a lot of old and roaming hands on a lot of should-be-dead veterans (not that I worried for Hazel’s sake, she didn’t so much as have half a muffin for a bum, not like me, with my
voluptui
; Rita might have had her guns, but I’d always had the nicest bottom around—and if she hadn’t been so busy shoving her bosom into people’s faces, maybe some of them would’ve noticed).

Hazel said she didn’t want to go. But that wasn’t the first thing she said. The first thing she asked was about who was down there. Were there any old folks from the early days?

I knew who she meant and in fact, John Berth was in there, his wife having died some years earlier. Bertie and Meryl Theodore were both in there. If I remember right, then Mrs. Stanton was also still alive and in the seniors’ home, although just barely.

All people from around when Tommy was killed. Just before Martin Jansen was hit by the car.

I told her they might be happy to see a familiar face. For anyone else I might have added a reminiscence about the barbecues in the summer, the Christmas lights contest on the block, the Saturday night parties in July. We’d even had a street party once. For anyone else I would have brought these things up and we might have had a nice jaw about the good old days, but I wasn’t sure, even then, that Hazel would have been included.

But she brought so much of it on herself.

I can’t go there
, she said about the senior’s home.
No one’s going to like me there and then after I go home they’ll all be talking.

What would anyone have to say, Hazel?
By then, I was getting old. Tired. Let’s be done with it. The days are gone and past. I want to forget and let it go.

They say I’m a witch. That I killed them all. Martin. Tommy
—she sucked up breath when she said his name, but god bless she said it—
poor Tommy.

What I said was,
Suit yourself.

I didn’t do anything to those people
, she said.
Not a goddamn thing.

And she repeated it, as I crossed back to my house.
I didn’t do a thing. Not a goddamn thing. You know that.
You
know that.

Ad infinitum.

Now is now. Things are changing in the neighbourhood, just as they’ve been changing all over the world. I think about those barbecues, those parties we used to give on the Saturdays and how innocent and naive our fun was; even our occasional evil was less evil than naughty. The beer we drank, the flirting, the harmless
stick ’em up!
What was considered bad then? Adultery, probably. Drugs. Beating on your kids, your wife. Even gossip was considered a poor choice of time spent—which is why we never really talked about Hazel and Tommy, or Hazel and Martin. Hazel and that yappy little dog. People spoke facts and maybe speculated privately, or maybe after so many years had passed the outcome was no longer important. But you never really talked about things like they do now.

Last week, I had a lady from way down the street somewhere come and tell me that the police had arrested her neighbour’s son. I couldn’t help myself, of course—and years of self-control couldn’t fight the urge—I asked why he was arrested, even though I guessed I knew.

It was drugs. He was involved in a gang.

A gang. On Burlington Street.

I imagine their Saturday night parties are much different from ours. I’m pretty sure the woman who moved into the house on the other side of Rita’s old place is cheating on the nice man I think is her husband, although you can’t be sure of these things any more. I see her husband leave in the morning, and this other fellow shows up a little while later. But what do I know?