RITCHIE WAS WEARING black jeans ripped in the knees and a
T-shirt that read Death To Brits on its soiled front. He'd
bought it the one time he was in Ireland. When he bent to
drop a paper full of droopy flowers on Nola's tray table,
she saw the black stallion on the back of his shirt. The
beast was bucking, its hind legs kicking up, the man on
its back gone sprawling, top hat and all — an Englishman,
she supposed, toppled by an Irishman.
"Fifteen minutes," the nurse said in a starched voice and,
frowning, rustled out.
Nola understood the frown. Here they were in a Canadian
hospital, with a picture of the queen on every wall! The
queen wore a silly little pillbox of a hat on top of her
bluish hair; the man in tights beside her was kissing her
plump hand like it was a warm macaroon. Ha! To Nola,
royalty was no better than poor Irish travellers like
herself — in spite of the fancy carriages and the horse
guards dressed to the teeth in velvet and lace.
"And where did you pick the flowers?" she said. "They got
vases here, you know. Just ask the nurse. They might die,
though, in the cold of this place."
Nola was always cold, even though the nurse insisted the
air-conditioning was turned down. It was because of the
surgery, the nurse said: brain surgery was a delicate
matter. Nola had been in critical, she'd barely come
through, they said. She didn't understand it. She'd simply
collapsed one day on the New York farm and Ritchie dragged
her over the border in his uncle's truck and up to this
Toronto hospital. Canadians took in every sick body was
the excuse. "Never you mind," Ritchie said. Meaning he
stole the posies off a cart or out of some florist's
window. And then, when she reached out for
them, "Leave 'em be — and get that white sack offa you,
we're outa here."
"No, Ritchie, I'm not ready."
They'd got the tumor (fancy that — she'd had a tumor, just
in front of the left ear it was), but she still felt the
weakness, the pain in the left temple. Besides, they fed
her three meals a day here, they said she was anemic; she
wanted to take full advantage before they tossed her out.
The next she knew he was in the locker, throwing jeans and
shirt at her, her rosary beads, her black purse, then
sucking up the lemonade on the tray table with a little
smirk, damn him. She'd been drinking it slowly, to savor
it, it had just the right sweetness. "Up," he
said. "Before the big nurse comes back. We gotta find
Darren."
"Darren doesn't want to go back," she said. Ritchie's half
brother, Darren, was fed up with the uncle's harsh ways.
He'd left the farm three weeks ago for Vermont where he
had a cousin on his nontraveller mother's side, and the
cousin had got him work on a nearby farm.
"Uncle wants him back. And move your butt, we gotta hit
the road."
"Hit it how, the road?" she asked. Uncle would want his
truck back, he wouldn't want it going to Vermont. And
their own pickup had died of old age the week before. She
couldn't believe Ritchie was doing this to her, with her
only five days before collapsing outside the cow barn.
He didn't answer her question. "What about Keeley?" she
asked. "I don't want the boy left there alone."
"I called Penny," he said. "She'll keep an eye on him."
Penny was their neighbor and Nola's friend; Keeley liked
her. She was a counselor in Keeley's school — when he went
to school, that is. Keeley was as shy as a chipmunk caught
dozing on your front porch. Now Nola's twelve-year-old son
was out for the summer and the neighbor had a part-time
job — she couldn't always look out for the boy.
Nola didn't have to go to Vermont. She could ring the
nurse, stay right here. She reached for the bell but
Ritchie's hand clamped down on her wrist. "You stay," he
said, "and you're on your own when they dump you outa
here. I wasted a week already waiting for you. Darren
could be in Mexico, and no one to say where."
She got up slowly — slowly was the only way she could do
it. Tormey Leary was cheap; he'd never let them take the
truck as far as Vermont, even if he did send Ritchie after
his brother. If Ritchie expected her to walk, it might
take a year — if she had a year to live. She staggered
some, deliberately, on the way to the toilet. He didn't
try to catch her, he'd know she was putting it on. She
heard the woman in the next cubicle groan — that one was
just out of surgery — gallbladder or something. At least
she was beyond hearing Ritchie's talk. Nola looked at the
puffy face in the mirror and grimaced.At thirty she was
already getting lines from the hot work in the cornfields.
She'd balked, but Ritchie wouldn't let up on her. He and
his half brother had capital in the uncle's place; he was
in the will, he said, they had to make a go of it.
"Hurry up, will ya." He was standing in the doorway,
scratching his armpits, shuffling his feet. "No time for
primping. You can do that on the road."
"I gotta sign out at least," she said. "I can't just
leave."
"You can," he said. "You definitely can."
She was too weak to fight back. There wasn't even the guts
in her to grab that last hunk of cake from the plate on
the tray table. And they'd left the posies behind. "My
flowers," she said, but Ritchie said, "Keep going."
On their way out down the echoey corridor a woman
shouted, "Don't go! Bad luck if you go!" A man stepped out
in the hall and narrowed his eyes at the dark-bearded
Ritchie, but Nola felt it was herself the woman was
speaking to.
Ritchie hustled her past the nurse's station, where the
nurse had her nose in a computer, down the elevator, and
out into the lobby, where no one paid attention to them,
no one at all. Outside she shut her eyes against the
dazzle of the late June sun. The traffic coming and going
sounded like the outer space she'd seen once in a Disney
film where the stars and planets and asteroids all spun
crazily about one another. Her knees gave way under the
terrible weight of her headache.
She leaned on Ritchie and this time he had to let her;
there was a cop standing on the corner. If Ritchie was
scared of one thing in his life, it was cops. One day
she'd dare to ask him why.
For now, she was his captive. They walked right past the
cop and around the corner to the truck and no one said a
word. She, for one, couldn't have said a word if she'd
wanted to, his arm was cramped so tight around her chest.
AS USUAL, Colm had fallen asleep after they made love. It
wasn't that he wanted to; she could hear him straining to
stay awake — all those groans and mutterings: "Love ya to
pieces, Ruthie, let's live together, let's...." The leg
and arm muscles shifting and twitching, and then the soft,
sonorous breathing into her neck. And he was off to
dreamland, leaving her wide, wide awake — all that
adrenaline left over from the lovemaking.
Ruth was glad, of course, that they were lovers; it had
been a long drought since Pete left — fully four years
while she'd struggled with the farm and the three
children. And Colm had waited all that time. Impatiently,
yes, but waited — the old Irish bullshit about "no other
woman" in his life since they'd first met in high school.
Though when she called it "bullshit" he'd rear up on his
hind legs and shout, "It's not fair, Ruthie, to say that
word when a guy bares his soul to you. Would you like me
to say 'You don't mean it when you tell me you love me'?"
No, she wouldn't. There were times when she had to back
off and apologize. No more using the word "bullshit" now
except out in the barn when she had to clean up the
droppings. She got up to use the bathroom, was suddenly
overcome with the heat. The sole air conditioner was in
the bedroom and that one installed only this summer over
her protests. Colm needed cooling, he said, to counteract
the sweat that oozed the length and breadth of his body
while making love. A normal Vermont summer had only four
or five days in the nineties, but this summer they were
already up to a dozen hot dry days and it was only the
fifth of July. A suffocating thought.
She shoved open the window and the sound of an accordion
poured in, and then a woman's sweet soprano. Ruth had
succumbed in a weak moment when Colm had brought along a
distant cousin to fill in for her hired man, Tim, who was
taking a year off to explore Alaska. But the cousin had
arrived in a pickup more battered than her own beat-up
Toyota and began to unload suitcases, tents, cooking
equipment, musical instruments. Then out came a dog, a
potbellied pig, and three human females: two adults and a
ponytailed girl barely out of puberty. They looked like
gypsies, but they weren't gypsies, according to Colm: they
were Irish travellers, whose forebears had come over after
the First World War. Some had settled, like the herds-man
Darren, who stemmed from a village in North Carolina; most
were clannish and peripatetic and kept to their own kind.
Colm was quick to point out that he had no traveller
blood: the kinship evolved through a perfectly respectable
Irish grandmother who'd happened after the war to wed a
handsome young traveller named O'Neill.
It was the younger adult, a thirtyish woman named Maggie,
who was singing now — something about love and loneliness.
They weren't quite the right words for Ruth, who had found
love these days but who still needed her space for quiet
thoughts. This was the first summer in years, in fact,
that she'd had the house all to herself. Teenager Vic was
a counselor at a summer camp and Emily was spending a
month at the Jersey shore with a college classmate.
Daughter Sharon, as always, was at home in East Branbury,
with a dozen chickens and three crowing roosters that were
the butt of threatening phone calls each week but that
Sharon and the grandbabies refused to part with.
The singing followed Ruth as she padded back into the
bedroom, and grew louder still when she pushed up the
window. Colm was asleep, sprawled now across the whole
bed. He was a restless sleeper, had only recently had
himself taped and wired head to toe to discover whether or
not he had a sleeping disorder. It might be sleep apnea,
he said when she laughed; she might find him dead one
morning in bed — did she have no compassion?
She had no compassion at least for these relatives, who
seemed already to have multiplied, for another female
voice was joining in and it wasn't the high-pitched
tremolo of the younger sister, Liz, or the quavery soprano
of Maggie's grandmother, whom she envisioned squatting on
the trailer steps, stroking her pet pig. This new voice
sounded more mature, a kind of deep-throated contralto. A
third instrument came in on the chorus of "Danny Boy": Oh
Danny Boy, the shades of night are fa-all-ing...and then a
male voice, slightly off key, bellowing Oh sweet Ellen-a-
Roon...
It was too much. Too loud. Too jarring. They were revving
up the cows in the pasture — she could hear the
bellowings. Colm must wake up, he must go down and deal
with them — never mind the sleep disorder. She shook him
and told him so. "Colm, love — we can't have this." She
snapped on the table lamp.
"Huh?" Colm looked startled, as though he'd seen an
apparition. She supposed she did look ghostlike: hair
hanging in her face, bags under her eyes she called
udders — a joke, of course — but when she looked in the
mirror they seemed to deepen and darken. Ruth hadn't
particularly worried about her appearance until she and
Colm became sexual partners, and now she found herself
taking surreptitious glances even in the shiny milk pans
in the cow barn.
"Listen," she said, and flung the window wide. One of the
female voices hit a high C and Colm groaned. The males
bawled an octave below. One of them attempted a harmony
that came out a cacophony. A drum joined the chorus; then
high-pitched laughter and more bellows from the pastured
cows.
"Tomorrow's Monday. Workday," he murmured, but it was no
excuse.
"They're your relatives," she reminded him. "And I work
every day. I need the peace." Colm yawned and started for
the door. "You can't go out naked," she said. "They'll
think you want to join in the orgy." She threw him his
shorts. He sat back on the bed to pull them on,
maddeningly slow, examining a mosquito bite on his leg,
just when the outdoors sounded like a whole rock-and-roll
band.
When the noise went on for another quarter of an hour she
went to see for herself. In spite of the light from
lanterns set up on plastic chairs, no one seemed to notice
her standing there in bathrobe and barn boots. She was
only one of a crowd of a dozen raggedy participants, all
beating on makeshift instruments: pots, fry pans, metal
waste baskets, glass bottles. A pale, thin woman was
clapping spoons together to a sentimental melody that the
traveller Maggie O'Neill was belting out an octave above
everyone else.
And where was Colm? Why, leaning against the John Deere
tractor, grinning ear to ear, his unshaved face pink in
the fire the group had made in front of the travellers'
trailer. He was waving his hands to the rhythm of pots and
accordion as though he were back on the old sod himself.
She threw him a dark look but his eyes were on the woman
playing the spoons — admittedly a beautiful woman: long
lustrous black hair, curving cheekbones, and skin the
color of milk. No, not milk but chalk, Ruth decided, for
there was a sickly pallor about the face. Her hands were
busy with the spoons but her dark violet eyes were gazing
up at the half-moon as though any minute she would swing
herself up on it and sail off to some quieter clime.
As Ruth watched, mesmerized, the woman appeared to shrink
into herself, like a genie melting back into its bottle.
In moments she was crumpled on the ground, curled up like
a fetus. Was she dead? Playacting? Or simply passed out,
drunk perhaps? The others, carried along by their music
making, appeared to ignore her. The music crescendoed to
its high, maudlin resolve.