As Evelyn stared into the bowels of the churning cement mixer
like a diviner peering into a pot of smoking entrails, she made
three vows about her life in the next world. First, forget graduate
school. Second, marry a plumber or an electrician, someone useful.
Finally, have fun. None of these tenets had been observed in
her marriage with Eliot.
At a turning point fifteen years ago, she could have followed her friend Becky
from Queen's University to a private prep-school teaching position on Vancouver
Island where kayaking the Pacific surf, exploring Haida villages, and feasting
on salmon had been part of the bargain. But the University of Toronto offered
her an assistantship in English Renaissance literature, and her parents in St.
John's, Newfoundland, who considered themselves fortunate to even finish high
school, were so proud: "You can never have too much education. Think of
the options that will be open to you, dear. Dad wrecked his back working at the
warehouse, and I'm on my feet all day at Canadian Tire." Old saws for old
times.
In graduate school she had met Eliot Bracebrook, who was studying eighteenth-century
French political philosophy and living in a garret with a leaky waterbed and
several dead plants. His witty banter and dark Byronic looks melted her heart.
Every time she saw that shy curl nestling at his temple, she longed to twine
it around her fingers. After a dizzying year of foreign films, cozy ethnic restaurants,
and evening strolls along Lake Ontario's beaches and on the quiet footpaths of
the Don Valley, they reached a mutual understanding that went beyond the plebian
nature of a proposal. She still shuddered at the roseate kaleidoscopic tone of
their woodblock wedding invitations:
On the sunlit rocks of Georgian Bay, Evelyn
and Eliot wish to celebrate with you. Barring
some misgivings and calming a few fears, we
believe that we will be good for each other
for a long time to come. Bring a favourite
food to share and a drinking vessel for soft
red wine.
She could have wept with nostalgia for the gullible romantic she'd
been, a keeper of scrapbooks and photographs. All she had sacrificed for a career,
and then all for love, and where was she? Five hours north of Toronto in Sudbury,
a roasted rock mining town where astronauts had once trained for the moon walk.
The trees had been shipped south to rebuild Chicago after the Great Fire more
than a century ago; then open pit nickel smelting had rained sulphur until the
smaller growth had surrendered too, and finally erosion set in and the very earth
had washed away. Progress towards regreening had been made, but the giant pines
and lofty oaks would never return to an area the size of New York City.
Snatching an assistant professorship at the local university, Eliot had been
the soul of logic. "Professional couples have to make tough choices. We
need to go where the better job is. You'll get on here if you're patient," he
promised, stressing his budding friendship with his chairman. "Bernard can
pull some strings, and besides, English doctorates are flexible." So flexible
that she had been lucky to crawl into a rundown junior high, with large, unruly
classes, gargantuan piles of marking, and no fat research trips such as Eliot
was planning for the fall. He already had his plane ticket for Rouen where he
intended to consult obscure documents on the political ramifications of one of
Montesquieu's trials. "A half-decent offer on the continent, and I'm out
of this deep freeze," he had told everyone at the faculty Christmas party,
as if he were a carefree bachelor. "We" was not a word that passed
his lips.
But this summer, there was the deck to finish. Last year, for investment purposes,
he had insisted that they build a cedar home on a large wilderness lake miles
from the city. Land was reasonable, and since a new nickel mine was underway
in the area, property values were expected to skyrocket for the well-paid white
hats who wanted to live near their job.
Suddenly an angry yell broke through the hum of the mixer. "Evelyn, get
over here!"
She leaned her shovel against the gravel pile and looked toward the boathouse
where her husband held up several bundles. "What a mess. Boxes of your junk
and an old suitcase. Come and get this stuff. I need room for my tools."
He tossed everything into a heap, settled into a lawn chair and lit a cigarette
while he watched a loon dive for minnows. A few minutes later he went into the
house and brought out his boyhood BB gun, seeing how close he could come to the
frightened bird.
Evelyn felt her neck muscles tighten as the poor creature fluttered down the
shoreline to safety. During the months of construction, she had developed a non-specific
arthritis. It hurt like hell, jumping from the hips to the knees to the feet
while leaving her knuckles perpetually sore. How odd that it didn't run in her
family. Maybe those weeks of clearing brush in the cold fall rain. Or cleaning
up debris after the work crews who left broken shingles, scrap wood, drywall,
electrical and plumbing trash layered in chronological fashion like the cities
of Troy. Elliot had made her responsible for tamping the basement earth with
a gut-wrenching machine, as well as the foundation parging and interior painting. "Every
penny saved counts," he would say. "Subcontractors are such ripoff
artists. Pay them top dollar and there's still a crack in the rear wall. Drunken
bastards. Good thing I know the meaning of the word 'backcharge.'" He'd
cut the framer's bill by ten percent by inventing defects.
Instead of pitching in, Eliot found a more comfortable home at the university
for research with his twenty-two-year-old blonde teaching assistant, Tammy. He
rolled his eyes at Evelyn's complaints.
His chronic symptoms indicated Buerger's disease, he told her. "Very documentable,
unlike your psychosomatic problems. Look at these white hands. No mistaking the
numbness." Still, he smoked a pack of unfiltered cigarettes a day and ate
and drank whatever he pleased. Nor did his self-diagnosis affect his abilities
to enjoy eighteen holes of golf from May to September.
Eliot's Rhodesian Ridgeback Monty (short for Montesquieu) chugged into view and
observed Evelyn's movements with a suspicious growl. Their dislike was mutual.
The dog wouldn't have bitten her but clearly
considered her a poor third in the pecking order. The large, burly dog snatched
the best place on the king-sized bed and barked whenever she sat in Eliot's recliner.
Evelyn remembered, with a lump in her throat, how her husband had made her get
rid of her two cats, Merlin and Gunner, claiming that he couldn't tolerate the
smell of the litter box. No matter how often she scrubbed and refreshed it, Eliot
persisted in his complaints until she had the animals put down. They had been
only three years old. Monty, however, was deemed necessary for security. "A
small price to pay for peace of mind out here in the boonies. Worth his weight
in gold," Eliot had said with a scoffing gesture when she had showed him
the shreds of her sheepskin slippers.
Down by the boathouse, she picked up the books, old friends almost warm in her
hands again, Tucker-Brooke and Levin, her leather-bound Tamburlaine bought at
Marlowe's Cambridge on a graduation trip to England, underlined obsessively,
each colour denoting a deeper analysis. They smelled musty but were in good shape,
merely needing some dry air. Then she opened the suitcase her mother had given
her for college and found her dissertation, its pages spotted with mildew. She
turned to the preface:
Ever since Marlowe was "rediscovered" in a Romantic age ill-equipped
to understand him, critics have reeled in horror at the atrocities of this Scythian
shepherd, rejoiced in his painful ending, and cited Marlowe's own atheism as
a bellwether for the play, yet could it be that the young poet, well-skilled
in the duplicity of his role as a British spy, was playing a joke on his audience,
limning a satire to which he planted clues throughout the ten acts?
Limning? Her thesaurus had been too well-thumbed. Evelyn placed a hand over her
mouth to avoid laughing out loud. And what a preposterously long sentence, typical
for a young doctoral candidate, foolishly confident that the fiery hoops through
which she was faithfully jumping for her stern professors would deliver the keys
to an honoured career. The realities of a crowded job market hit home as the
rejection letters poured in, fresh wounds every day when the postman arrived. "Barring
an attack of the Black Plague," one read, "there will not be an opening
in our department for another twenty-five years." How smug they all were
in their tenured nests. She recalled the single offer she had received from a
small college in southern Alberta. "Really, my dear," Eliot had chuckled,
inking a New York Times crossword. "A one-year appointment in a hick town
full of rednecks. Trust me. You'd be miserable."
But once she had left academia, Evelyn's career had suffered the same fate as
virginity in Marlowe's Hero and Leander: "Jewels, being lost, are found
again, this never. 'Tis lost but once and once lost, lost forever." Or in
the more modern phrasing of one of her eighth graders when he returned from the
bathroom to find his books missing, "You leave the room, you take the risk." The
Alberta job might have opened up connections in Calgary or Edmonton, but it came
too late.
A scuffling sound startled her. Eliot strode toward her, tapping his watch, his
florid face contorted in scorn. "Jesus, that trash stinks! Stop maundering
around in it and get back to business. Don't you dare bring it inside. Evelyn,
do you hear me?"
She rose painfully from her knees, swiping at a blackfly, which had nestled into
her neck and inspecting the blood on her fingers. The oily dope was wearing off. "I'll
take my books to school."
"You haven't missed them in years. Why get so bloody attached now?" He
flipped a cigarette onto the lawn where it joined a collection. "I'd better
not see them in the house. And don't try to sneak them into the basement."
As he walked away, Evelyn returned to her treasures. On the bottom of the suitcase,
she found an old note from her advisor: "I'm distressed that you cannot
take the assistant editorship of the Elizabethan Quarterly next winter. It would
have been quite a boost for your resume, but you must do as you see fit." She
had needed the extra time to edit and type Eliot's five-pound dissertation. What
had a wise feminist once said? That learning to type enslaved women?
After locating the Deep Woods OFF and spraying herself from head to toe, she
returned to the droning mixer. The seven support pillars were ready to be filled.
Only a hellish week ago, though it seemed like a lifetime, Eliot had rented a
Bobcat backhoe, a "gravedigger," to excavate the massive holes, leaving
behind piles of boulders as large as bowling balls. Evelyn had been dispatched
with a fifteen-pound mine pry bar borrowed from their neighbour to hack down
the last foot since the machine couldn't reach the deeper clay and rock of the
Northern Ontario lakeside. Finally, with a small trowel, she had chipped away
a quarter-inch at a time, Eliot sipping a frosty Upper Canada Lager in the cab
of the machine. Then the rain had begun.
"The water is filling the hole. I can't go any further, farther, whatever," she
had said, her dripping glasses blurring the fine line between rock and clay.
"I told you over and over that the code says five feet, so get something
to bail with.-- a margarine container or an old pot. Then grab a sona tube. We're
ready to go on this one."
When the hole had been scooped to his satisfaction, Eliot held each huge cardboard
tube while she shovelled in gravel to anchor the base. Then he called the rental
agency to send the float to take away the expensive backhoe, so most of the excavation
had to be refilled by hand, and the heavy, settled clay did not yield easily.
"Throw the damn rocks back down, Evelyn. We're not farming here," he
called as he headed for his Audi. "I have a lunch date with the Dean."
The last hole had been filled yesterday, just before they took Monty to town
for his tooth cleaning with an overnight stay scheduled in case there was a reaction
to the anaesthetic. Now the empty tubes waited for cement. Evelyn put her books
and luggage into the trunk of her rusty Neon and returned to work. Her job was
to combine the ingredients: not too thin or it wouldn't harden, and not too thick
to pour into the wheelbarrow. Eliot's careless placement of the gravel pile forced
her to walk backwards to hoist the shovelfuls over her shoulder into the mixer.
He refused to relocate the cumbersome machine. "Too much trouble. People
make such a big deal about ergonomics. Just don't trip. All I need is a broken
ankle for you at this critical point. I'll be sitting for twenty-four hours in
the Emerg."
***
She added a slurp of water from the hose and paused to see if the concrete was
dropping off the blades with the right hesitation. Eliot stomped over, huffing
at the delay. "What kind of a mess do you call this?" he asked with
a contemptuous grunt. "Aren't you being scientific? I said, and I said distinctly,
five shovels of gravel and sand to one of cement powder. Do I have to write it
down? And you should be measuring the water, not just hosing it in." He
removed his canvas hat and wiped his brow. "I'm going for a brew. Fool around
with this until you have it right. Then come and get me."
Three beers and several sandwiches later, Eliot was holding the wheelbarrow ready
and still frowning. "Too thin. It's gruel. Never going to set. Do I have
to mix this myself? Are you stupid or something? Don't you have a Ph.D.?" After
adding a shovel of cement powder and nodding in satisfaction, he trundled the
barrow to the waiting tubes that were poking up a foot above the ground. Evelyn's
shoulders ached as she eased each lumpy mass down the hole, hearing a smuck as
it hit bottom far below.
"Hurry up!" he yelled. "Shovel that stuff faster, or it's going
to harden in the wheelbarrow."
Biting her lips against the pain, Evelyn guided the cement down the dark hole. "More,
more," Eliot called. "Depeche-tois!"
She thought of the work to come. The rest of the support pillars. And then the
gigantic deck. Endless piles of cedar waited under tarps to be cut, stained,
and hammered. Eliot had insisted that they could do the work themselves, with
a few neighbours to help hoist the main beams. The labour would continue to the
end of her summer vacation and Eliot's happy departure for Europe. Her joints
flamed up; her eyes brimmed with hot tears. As Eliot looked down the tube and
sneezed, she smashed the heavy shovel quite decisively on his bald spot. He had
always been so artistic in arranging his thinning hair.
The rest wasn't that difficult. Evelyn remembered how Eliot had told her to dress
a doe he had shot last winter on Manitoulin Island. From the rows of tools in
the boathouse, she selected a coping saw for the finer work, then deposited some
of Eliot into each of the seven sona tubes. Good thing they were twelve-inch,
she thought, but her husband never stinted. "Build for strength," he
always said. Cleaning was a breeze with the hose handy.
Evelyn returned to her cement, whistling "The Ghosts' High Noon" from
Ruddigore as she filled the tubes. Eliot never let her play her Gilbert and Sullivan
on his elaborate compact disc system. "Lollipop music," he labelled
it, preferring Bach cantatas. Seven batches, seven pillars of wisdom. T. E. Lawrence
seemed a good choice for bedside reading tonight. She finished as the sun dipped
through the maple trees behind the house, shadowing it against the still lake.
With a satisfied smile, she smoothed each cement top and inserted a large screw
and nut, carefully greased, as Eliot had decreed.
Then she went inside, showered with kiwi body gel, and cooked a batch of chicken
enchiladas with Five Alarm salsa. Eliot disdained Mexican food. "How anyone
can cobble together a cuisine out of the ingredients of poverty, I'll never know," he
once said with a sneer. "Tortillas and refried beans, my God!" She
went to bed, slipping between the cool and soothing sheets, sleeping for ten
hours without the slightest twinge of pain or guilt.
The next day she collected Monty and visited an auto wrecking business where
Eliot had bought a hubcap for his Audi. The dog had been in the car, and the
owner of the auto yard had been very impressed with the muscular Ridgeback. The
large property was the perfect place for him to exercise his nasty talents with
abandon. "My husband is going to Europe on an extended trip, and I'll be
travelling myself. We were very sad about Monty, but then I thought of you," Evelyn
explained, smiling as she handed over Mr. Taco, Big Mac, and a fifty-pound bag
of Eukanaba chow. The dog was already roaming its new territory, lifting a leg
at each post.
As for the sabbatical, it would be easy to arrange a message from Rouen saying
that Eliot would be staying on. France would be pleasant in late August. No blackflies.
His ticket read E. Bracebrook, less red tape for her. With his well-known contempt
for the shortcomings of a backwoods university and general unpopularity, no one
would question his decision. And when she returned, the sale of the house would
finance her move to British Columbia. Her friend Becky was now head of the English
Department and had mentioned an opening due to retirement.
Not long after, when the workmen had finished the deck, her neighbour, Sulo Maenpaa,
strolled by to admire the job. Taking off his Blue Jays hat, he looked at the
six hundred square feet of burnished gold. "Wow!" he said. "B.C.
cedar. Must have cost an arm and a leg."
Evelyn blinked and smiled proudly as she looked far across the still lake at
the silken fog rising off the North River. So benign, so beautiful. If she hadn't
known about the eternal winter lurking around the corner, she'd have stayed to
enjoy the fruits of her labours. "Yes, Sulo," she answered. "It
certainly did."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lou Allin is the author of the Belle Palmer mystery series, set in
the Nickel Capital. Her novels Northern Winters are Murder, Blackflies are Murder,
Bush Poodles are Murder, and Murder, Eh? are all published
by RendezVous Press in Toronto.
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