Vinyl Cafe Unplugged (31 page)

“It was just a minor-league contract,” said Art, when Dave asked him about it that spring Kevin Campbell was called out sliding into third base and Art asked Dave for the chocolate bar.

Dave never saw Art play ball, but he saw him play golf. Art hit the ball long and straight and easy just as you would have thought.

Art and his plaid shirts. Art and his suspenders. Art and his dog.

Art always traveled with a dog at his knees. He had one, a sheltie, who used to chew tobacco. Kept chewing even after Art himself quit.

Art, who moved around town as if he were connected to it by a big elastic band. You couldn’t imagine Art leaving The Narrows—he would be snapped back if he went too far. In some ways, he
was
the town. You got the feeling that if
he
left, everyone would have to go.

Art, who started delivering ice when he was thirteen years old, in the days when everyone in town depended on the Gillespies. They had a team of blind horses that pulled the ice wagon in those days—two old pit ponies who knew the route so clean that Art and his brother would jog along beside the wagon working either side of the street as the horses stopped where they were supposed to, without anyone telling them. Norm would ride in the back of the wagon and cut ice—and keep the books. The father had taught his boys a series of hand signals that
his
father had taught him, and as they peeled out of a house, they would either wiggle their hand in the air the way you signal a waiter for a bill (that meant a charge) or they’d swing their whole arm out, like an umpire calling a man safe at home, which meant they had been paid. Twenty-five cents for fifty pounds.

Art, who worked with the horses and could show you a photo of a clipper ship loading ice that his grandfather had cut out of Bras d’Or Lake, bound for Europe. Cape Breton ice, boy. Going to Paris.

Art, who had kept the ice business going. Bought an ice-making machine when refrigeration came and delivered bags of Big Narrows ice cubes as far away as Sydney. He kept harvesting a few hundred pounds of ice out of the lake every January—just because—but he wasn’t sentimental about it. He loved the new machine. He would reach into the freezer and pull out a handful of ice cubes, holding them the way a grain farmer might hold a handful of prize seed. He would pop a cube in his mouth, suck on it and then pull it out, saying, “Now that’s beautiful ice . . . you put that in a glass of water and it would just shimmer. It’s so clear it would disappear.”

When he got the ice machine, he bought a storefront on Main Street between the Maple Leaf Restaurant and Judy’s Sewing Shop. He opened a laundromat in front and had the ice machine in a room at the back. “Same business,” he said. “Just add water.” To get to his office (which was in the back, with the ice) you had to walk down a narrow laneway between the restaurant and the laundromat, past the vent for the dryers. Which meant you had to walk through clouds of steam to get to the ice—a fact that pleased Art.

Through the steam to an office that looked like the ticket bureau at the old railroad station—Art’s yellowed varnished desk, Art’s rubber stamps, a spike for invoices.

Art and his dog. Flannel shirt. Suspenders.

Art, who lived for ice, went to Florida once a year with Betty, his wife. The first time they went was on a bus tour of the southern United States. First stop, Memphis. When Dave asked him about Memphis, all Art said was “The ice was cloudy. They don’t know how to make decent ice down there.” He didn’t like Orlando either: “Shopping malls everywhere.” But he liked Cape Canaveral. And he liked the beach. “First thing I did,” he said, “was make a snow angel in the sand.”

Art.

Art, who made ice. Art, who gave Dave his first summer job. Art, who coached ball.

Art, who had been around long enough to remember the year his family got the first radio in Big Narrows. Nineteen twenty-eight. You had to use earphones to listen. And Art loved to tell the story about how, on account of the earphones, he was the only person in the house, in fact the only person in Big Narrows, to hear the report about the abnormally high tides in the Thames River in London, England. Tides so high they were threatening to overflow and burst the riverbanks. He was eleven years old. They had only owned the radio three days, and he was unaccustomed to the conventions of the medium. He got the Thames River in London, England, muddled with the Thamesville Creek, which ran through The Narrows. He was convinced the entire town was going to be swept away. He insisted on sleeping in the attic for three nights. His mother let him because he was so intense about it, though he wouldn’t tell her why. He didn’t see the point in getting everyone worked up.

Two years before the Great Flood, as he came to call it, two years before that, when Art was nine years old, Princess Elizabeth was born, also in London. And somehow Art got her muddled up with Elizabeth MacDonnell, the grocer’s daughter, who was born the same week. Art was thirteen before he worked out that Elizabeth MacDonnell, the grocer’s daughter from Big Narrows, with her brown eyes, her shoulder-length chestnut hair and her winsome smile, wasn’t going to be Queen one day.

Art.

Art Gillespie—dead now, a year and a half. No, two years. Two years since he had died.

Whenever Dave thought about that baseball game in 1966 when Kevin Campbell was called out sliding into third base, he would start thinking about Art, about the Great Flood and Elizabeth MacDonnell and about how the kids from The Narrows used to meet the kids from Linquist on Saturday nights and dance on the bridge. Art met Betty at one of those bridge dances. “Walking My Baby Back Home” was playing on a wind-up gramophone.

Art Gillespie gone. Who could believe it?

Dave couldn’t. In the days after Art’s death Dave would think about these things and be swallowed by a rush of panic. He would never see Art again. It felt like claustrophobia.

He worried because he couldn’t remember what color Art’s eyes were. Now wasn’t that a stupid thing to get upset about? But there was nothing he could do to stop himself. It upset him.

Art. Goddamn it. Art.

As the months passed Dave’s anxiety slowly faded—slowly Art joined that woolly corner of Dave’s brain where sorrow and regret hung out. It was a corner Dave tried to avoid, a place he was pushed into from time to time, sometimes by something someone did or said, but just as often by a smell, the wind, the color of the sky.

The sky was blue and brilliant the autumn afternoon the letter arrived to nudge him back to Art. The letter was from Art’s wife, Art’s widow, Betty. Oddly Dave had been thinking about Art not an hour before he found the letter in the mailbox and sat on his front steps to read it. On his way home he had walked past a park where a group of children were playing soccer baseball—a game he hadn’t thought about for years. His memories of soccer baseball got him thinking of the hours he had spent as a boy bouncing a tennis ball against the brick wall of the Big Narrows’ schoolhouse. And once he got to baseball and school there was Art—guaranteed—waiting for him.

So Art was in his mind, or had been anyway, when he arrived home and found the letter and sat on the front steps to read it.