Given Page 13

  Vernal handed me the Holy Brew Wet List. “Here’s a good one to wake up with,” he said, pointing to a drink called God’s Blessing. I said I’d always thought Irish Coffee was a contradiction in terms. Why bother to get drunk and sober up at the same time? I took a seat on a bar stool and said I’d like a cup of tea.

  Father Tunney agreed with me. “She’s got a fair point.” He pronounced “point” “pint,” and said I’d given him a new purpose in life, to find where the teapot was hiding.

  I said I didn’t want to put him to any trouble, and Father Tunney said, “no trouble at all, not at all.” He’d be back in the time it took a crab to reach its destination even walking sideways, he would just have to conduct a small search of the kitchen where the teapot had last been seen trying to conceal itself behind a multitude of sins that he’d been meaning to remove from the premises.

  He came back, eventually, empty-handed. “There’s all the whiskey your heart could desire, but not a drop of tea at all. It was on my list, didn’t I forgot to pick it up last time I was over to the store . . . ”

  “Not to worry,” I replied, cutting him off before he had a chance to use any more words. “I’ll have a glass of water instead.”

  “T’will rust your insides, so,” Father Tunney said, which I took to mean water was not his poison of choice. He winked at me, one eye disappearing in the fat folds of his skin.

  Vernal kept half-rising from his stool at the bar, then sitting back down again. He could maintain this air of being just about to leave, I knew from years of experience, throughout a whole night’s drinking. I watched him try to put back a stack of credit cards that had spilled from his wallet next to a jar of pickled eggs. Then he chugalugged his drink, and asked me to wait for him. His noon-hour meeting was about to begin in the church basement; he was in charge of making the coffee there and he would personally bring me a cup. I’d asked for tea, but since when did Vernal listen?

  Father Tunney watched him go, shaking his head as if he could read the tangled thoughts going every which-way through my mind. “What whiskey won’t cure they say there’s no cure for, so. Your man there, he has a great strength for the weakness.”

  I sat contemplating Vernal’s on-again off-again funeral with the glass. I felt so desperate I even thought of asking the half-cut Father Tunney for advice, but my train of thought was broken by the sound of the church doors banging open.

  “We’re closed,” said Father Tunney. “’Tis no place here for a bag-eyed inebriate such as yourself.” His expression abruptly changed; I turned on my seat to see who had lifted his spirits.

  “Come on in, son, you’re very welcome. I thought you might be one of them film crew fellas. They practically drank the place dry.”

  I watched Hooker Moon, in slow motion, walking towards me. He stopped in front of the stool that Vernal had just vacated.

  “This seat taken?”

  I shook my head, then nodded. “Vernal’s gone to get me a coffee. There’s a noon hour meeting . . . downstairs.”

  Hooker gave me a conspiratorial look. “I used to bring this one bad friend of mine here. He’d run out of coffee at home, I’d tell him, ‘come to AA, partner. They always serve coffee at those meetings downstairs.’”

  Father Tunney asked Hooker if he was having the usual, and when Hooker nodded, opened a Diet Pepsi and poured it into a glass. Hooker lowered his lips to the rim and ran his tongue around the edge. His tongue was pink, like cyclamen. Then, as if to prove he could do with one hand everything I could do, he handcuffed the stem of the glass with the hook, and snapped it shut.

  I asked Father Tunney for more water.

  “I’m supposed to be closed at noon,” Father Tunney said. “You’re a fine lot of sinners, coming in here and ordering me about.” He stopped, and placed his hand on Hooker’s shoulder. “There’s been another bereavement. I’ve the funeral to conduct in an hour’s time.” He said this in the same weary tone he’d used when telling me he would have to search the kitchen, hoping to find the teapot behind a multitude of sins.

  “Better make it a double, then,” Hooker said, nodding at my empty glass.

  “That’s right,” said Father Tunney. “I’ll leave you two to your madness. Lock the door behind you on your way out, will you? If you leave, that is, before I get back.”

  I took a sip of my water, and then another, but I couldn’t taste anything. Vernal still hadn’t returned with my coffee.

  Hooker was watching me. I felt my face growing hot.

  He asked me if I would join him at a table. He’d never liked sitting on stools at the counter, it made him feel like one of those deadbeats who propped up the bar.

  “You don’t drink,” I said. It wasn’t a question. I remembered the bottles I had found in the hearse, thinking how sometimes when a light comes on it’s for the darkest possible reason. I’d been fooled, once again. Or, as I had done enough times in the past, fooled myself.

  “Not anymore,” he said. “Not for about seven years lately. Gave it up. Nothing better to do, I guess.”

  A change came over Hooker’s face. “I’m not going to lie to you. You only lie to the police or to your girlfriend. The Uncle boots, and your old man he asked me to get him some hard stuff so I did. The Uncle threw in that parsnip wine as an extra. Most of the time he can’t even give it away, but he’s proud of it.”

  He sensed my agitation and stopped, then lowered his voice, fixing his eyes on his hook as he spoke. “Sometimes you have to do the worst thing, the worst thing you know how to do. It’s the only way, sometimes, you can get free from yourself.”

  I wasn’t sure what he was talking about — the fact that Vernal was drinking again, or that he, Hooker, had procured the booze, but Hooker had moved on to another subject. He was telling me how lucky it was that his mother had died where she did and they’d been able to bury her before the ground turned too cold.

  “Your mother passed away?” I said, shocked by his matter-of-fact voice. “When? When did that happen?”

  “Friday night, coming home from getting her hair done. She’d stopped over at the Uncle’s to pick up some pie dish Agnes never returned. She got all the way home, stepped out of the taxi and bingo! Seized up.”

  Hooker could come from nowhere with a nonchalance that punched your breath out.

  I touched my bracelet, as if trying to cover the frog’s face so it couldn’t look at me. “I’m sorry,” I said. If it stays on top it means you’ll have a long life. If it jumps off right away, it means someone else is going to die. I felt suddenly like a murderer.

  “Sorry for what? You didn’t kill anyone,” Hooker said, shrugging it off. “It’s pretty hard to care about a dead person you never met before.”

  He closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair, pushing it out from under the table so I could see his whole body. I liked it when he had his eyes closed because I could stare at his lips, his cheekbones, his nose, his perfect skin, his hook; it was as if, looking at him, my eyes had been opened to a different kind of beauty.

  “The way I figure it, if you choose a new life you must not have had time for the old one anymore,” Hooker said. “It just didn’t take her as long as most people to figure that out.”

  He spoke with his eyes closed, as if he knew I was studying him and wanted to give me time. “We buried her yesterday. That’s what she would have wanted — get her money’s worth out of the new hairdo.” I couldn’t tell if he was kidding.

  He stopped and rubbed his hands across his belly, opened his eyes and laughed at me. “I’m just having fun with you,” he said. “My naha’s never been afraid of what will happen to her in the afterlife.” He said his mother had attended the church before it burned down, but since the church didn’t approve of their traditional ways they’d held the funeral service Monday afternoon in the community hall with the ladies making tea and sandwiches and Father Tunney officiating.

  The real send-off, Hooker said, was tomorrow night, something he called
the Feast for Hungry Souls but in his typical fashion didn’t try and explain. “Come on up to the village. I’m inviting you.”

  My eyes had settled on the yellow toothbrush around his neck. I tried not to let myself look at the rest of him, to explore further than where his white shirt, missing the top three buttons, opened to expose a V of smooth brown flesh. But my eyes travelled down to his cobra-skin belt and, for a moment, rested between his legs. “When should I come?” I asked. I folded my hands on the table, feeling awkward again.

  “Whenever you’re ready, that’ll be good. Just show up. When you make too many plans it interferes with the way things are meant to turn out on their own.” He paused. “Go to the Uncle’s place. Agnes will tell you where to find me. I’d tell you myself except I don’t plan that far ahead.”

  Hooker still hadn’t opened his eyes, but I knew, by the dance going on in the corners of his mouth, he was laughing at me.

  “You’d think you’d gone handicapped on me, the way you keep staring.” And then, more gently, “Never be embarrassed by something you like.”

  When it came time for the AA meeting to start and Vernal still hadn’t come back with my coffee, Hooker and I went looking for him. The downstairs meeting room was empty but the doors opening onto the graveyard were ajar. A crowd had gathered around a recently excavated plot in the pioneer section, and when we went to investigate we found Vernal, his limbs jutting at odd angles from his body, at the bottom of a grave. A man with ill-fitting teeth said that before anyone tried jumping in to help him out we ought to get a medical opinion. I whispered to Hooker that Vernal didn’t believe in doctors. Hooker said when you fall drunk into an empty grave it doesn’t matter what you believe any more.

  When Father Tunney returned from his lunch and discovered the entire AA meeting outside, coffees in hand, clustered around the grave, he tried to take charge, sending Hooker to borrow a ladder from Marg at the Snipe and the man with the bad teeth to fetch Dr. Bucket from the walk-in clinic.

  Dr. Bucket said this was the first time he’d had to administer a painkiller in a grave. Vernal groaned and said all he needed was a drink. The doctor said he could use one, too, then lectured Vernal on the art of drinking as much as you could without embarrassing yourself in front of other people. But this was not the moment to imbibe, he said; the polite thing to do would be to get Vernal out of the grave before the grave’s rightful occupant showed up. Vernal would have to be medevaced to St. Jude’s in Vancouver because they didn’t have the facilities on the island to cope with anything serious. Vernal had broken his hip, one of his arms and an ankle. Dr. Bucket felt Vernal was lucky he hadn’t sustained any mortal injuries, that God looks after drunks and babies. “Let me put it another way,” he said, when he had climbed out of the grave to give us his considered opinion. “The only thing he’s not going to be doing is a whole lot of ballroom dancing over the next couple of months.”

  “No sober man dances, unless he happens to be mad,” said Father Tunney, “as you would know if you had been reading your Cicero lately.”

  It took most of the afternoon to get Vernal out of the grave and onto a stretcher one of the AA members procured from the clinic. The funeral that had been scheduled for two o’clock, and over which Father Tunney was to have been presiding, had to be postponed.

  Half-a-dozen alcoholics, as solemn as pallbearers, hefted Vernal from the graveyard into the hearse. All six insisted on accompanying us to the airport. Before he was carried out to the plane, Vernal told me to look for his wallet in his pants pocket — I’d find a couple of hundred in change and he wasn’t going to need spending money where he was going, anyway.

  “You’re going to be fine, you’re not going to hell. Not this weekend, anyway,” I said, adding that I doubted the devil would want to be saddled with an invalid; he’d have to get better, first.

  “Don’t,” Vernal said, screwing up his face to keep from laughing. “You’re torturing me. It hurts.”

  I held his hand and told him I would come to the mainland as soon as I’d made arrangements. I would stay at the Walled Off, sort through what was left of my mother’s possessions and clean the place out. I felt guilty as I spoke; I knew myself well enough to know that “making arrangements” was my way of buying time to rendezvous with the bad Hooker Moon. Time to do the worst thing, the very worst — a chance to free myself from the place where, despite my recent escape, I still remained imprisoned.

  I stood in the parking lot, watching Vernal’s plane take off and slip behind scumbled clouds, then drove back to the farm. I was on my way upstairs to tell Rainy and Frenchy about Vernal’s fall when I heard the phone ring.

  She sounded out of breath, as if she had sprinted in from outside.

  “Mother?” I wanted to tell her what had happened to Vernal, that I was coming to the mainland to stay at the Walled Off, but out of the silence I heard her cough, and then put the phone down to light a cigarette. I had an image of her from my childhood, sitting in the summer garden late at night, lighting each gasper from the butt of her last, flicking the glowing end into the dark. “It’s not the coughin’ that carries you off, it’s the coffin they carry you off in,” my father would say whenever she lit up.

  I heard her inhale, then let out a deep breath, as if expelling the last remnants of the person she’d been. I knew what she would say back to my father, too. “I love the feeling of smoke filling my lungs. There’s nothing quite like it.”

  I began picking at the skin around my fingernails that had had time to heal since our last communication. I wanted to go upstairs, crawl into bed and rock myself, gently, to still my heart and my mind and everything deep inside me racing away in darkness. I wanted to hang up the phone and walk outside into the severely sunny evening and lie down in the long grass and listen to nothing more than the sound of the worms turning in the earth. I tried not to sigh, but it came out that way. I curled my hand into a fist, to stop myself from picking, and when she refused to speak to me, hung up and went upstairs.

  A couple being interviewed on God Listens claimed they’d found Jesus while selecting cold cuts at the Winn Dixie Superstore in Miami Beach, that His light shone down on them over the shaved ham.

  I seen the light once. It hurt my eyes, Frenchy said, as I pulled my duffel bag out from under the bed so I could start packing. Rainy asked where I was going and I told them about Vernal’s accident, that I would be going to the mainland to clean out my mother’s house, but first I was going up to take a trip up to Old Mystic on Thursday evening.

  I saw horror twisting at Rainy’s eyes in their oozing sockets, and then she started sniffling. You not plannin on takin us widju?

  I shook my head. You always bouncin, Rainy said, in an accusatory tone, and turned her back on me, the sour smell of her filling the room. I could feel the cold coming from her body. How you gon keep us here? You gon shut us in a box and nail down the lid?

  She pursed her lips at the HE, lying on his back in his coffin, going glock-glock-glock and stroking his rat. The Twin Terrorists sat in their Chrysalis, on the other side of the room, fantasizing — the way some women spent hours poring over bridal magazines for the right train — about their wedding with eternity. I hadn’t given any thought to what would become of my friends without me at the farm. I felt the shock coming from Frenchy’s eyes, even from behind the blacked-out lenses of my Eternals.

  “You have each other,” I said. “You can keep each other company.”

  Frenchy insisted the house was haunted, there were too many ghosts. Rainy cried and pleaded with me not to leave them alone. She’d thought death would be a cure for loneliness, but it had only made her feel worse.

  We come back to chill widju. What you think, you just walk away? Frenchy said, looking at my eyes, not into them.

  Jello salad tilt both ways, girl, Rainy said; she seized my duffel bag, opened it, climbed in and stood in it by the door. The sight of her wiping away parts of her face, loosened by the deluge of her tears
, wore me down. I told my friends if they promised to stay at the farm while I went to Old Mystic tomorrow evening they could come with me to the mainland.

  PART FIVE

  You can grieve your heart out and in the end you are

  still what you were. All your grief hasn’t changed a thing.

  — Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

  BEFORE I LEFT THE FARM I CALLED the hospital in Vancouver. When I finally got through to Vernal, he sounded sober. He had a private room, with a phone and a TV. The only thing missing, he said, was a mini-bar.

  I drove to Old Mystic, worrying about Vernal; everywhere I looked I was reminded of the trip we’d made to the north end of the island together. And when, on the outskirts of the village I saw a black pig rooting in a field of dead goldenrod, I heard Rainy in my ear, reciting nursery rhymes:

  Dis here little pig jet ta market,

  Dis here little pig be layin bac in da cut . . .

  Passing a pink tricycle that had been left, twisted out of shape, by the side of the road, I thought of Frenchy, after her father had cut off her finger. She had wrapped it in a paper towel and stolen a tricycle from a neighbour’s yard to ride to the hospital, where they wouldn’t let her in.

  I parked in front of the Uncle’s house and sat for a while, watching great cloud-wagons being pulled out to sea by the wind. Hope complicates your life; this much, I knew, and nothing could make me start desiring my husband again, the same way I couldn’t stop thinking about Hooker Moon.

  I got out and walked up the crushed shell path to the front door. After I had knocked three or four times and had turned to leave, a tiny woman with a crumpled face opened the door. In the half-light of the hallway, her body looked like a boulder shaped by a century of storms.

  “Come in, come in,” she said, ushering my inside. “I thought it was a koko-stick the way you knocked. Ha ha ha to hell with you. That’s how it sounded: ha ha ha to hell with all of you.” Her voice was clear and quick, but sad underneath. “A koko-stick,” she repeated, seeing my questioning look. “That’s what we call the woodpecker in our language.”