Snoot, their six-month-old kitten, darted out the open kitchen door through Jim’s legs. He swept her up into his arms, watched his mother draw closer, saw her smile through the tiredness on her face. She was working the night shift at the factory. She clomped up onto the porch, made as if to spray him with the primer. He held up the kitten in defence. They laughed. Then he handed Snoot to her, kicked off his shoes and stepped into his rubber boots. She held the kitten like a baby, stroking her dove-grey stomach.
“Where you headed?” she asked.
“Beavers have taken the pass,” he said, trying to sound jokey and gruff.
“Want a hand?”
Jim shook his head. “I’ll take Gladys. That okay?”
His mother smiled. “Oh, I’m sure she’ll appreciate it. Doesn’t get much company these days,”
Jim plonked back down the steps to the yard. “Everett sends his best,” he said without turning. He had to pass on the message, but he didn’t like it. Didn’t like men paying attention to his mother.
“Why, I think I’ll just phone him right up and ask him over for corn and potato chowder,” she said in a jaunty voice. She posed like a fashion model, glamorous in her black overalls and ball cap, her face freckled with red primer paint. “What’s the use of getting all dolled up if there aren’t any gentlemen callers,” she added, batting her eyelashes.
Jim managed a chuckle despite himself.
Gladys stood a little worse for wear in the garden. The garden didn’t need a scarecrow anymore. It was fall-weary, mostly dead but for the pumpkins and carrots. There were still withered scarlet runners clinging like arthritic fingers to the vine, winter squash, a few behemoth zucchini — nothing any bird was about to carry off.
The scarecrow wore a stained and decrepit white tux, a purple fedora and a pink fright-wig glued to a semi-deflated volleyball head.
“Hmmm,” said Jim, looking her over. “I’m trying to imagine a beaver frightened enough of you to fly away.” Gladys just grinned.
With the scarecrow on his shoulder and a shovel in his free hand, Jim walked along the tractor lane through the cornfield. Arnold Tysick and Ormond McCoy from up the line towards Onion Station had helped them plant the corn that spring and had already volunteered to help with the harvest. There hadn’t been a frost yet, but it wouldn’t be long. It took two or three good hard frosts to dry out the feed corn just right.
Jim was trying to remember stuff like that now. He had helped with the farm work since he was six or so, but he was going to have to pay special attention from now on. In the summer, his mother had found work at the Jergens soap factory in Ladybank. Money was tight. They weren’t sure what they were going to do about the farm. Hold on as best they could, for the time being. There was no way Iris Hawkins would hear of Jim dropping out of school.
“What would Hub have thought of that?” she had said to him. His father never finished grade eleven, but he regretted it all his life and made up for it as best he could. He had been an avid reader, mostly history.
“How’re you gonna know what to do if you don’t know what you did?” he used to say. And sometimes he would add in a mocking, grave tone, “Jimbo, history is all we’ve got in this God-forsaken corner of the county.”
Jim placed Gladys’s gloved hand on his left shoulder and whirled around as if they were dancing. An odd couple — he in gumboots and overalls, Gladys’s tux tails flapping in the bright fall air. He’d seen his dad dance with Gladys.
The memories came on like this sometimes, like a sweet, sad avalanche. He had learned to ride them out, not to fight them. But there had been a time when the memories had come on so fiercely that they stopped up his throat so he could hardly breathe. For three months he hadn’t been able to talk. Not a word. Only bit by bit did he get his voice back, his life back. But not Hub.
Crossing the stile into the lower meadow, Gladys’s head fell off.
“Can’t take you anywhere,” said Jim, leaning the scarecrow torso against the fence. He rescued the volleyball head from the weedy overgrowth, getting a handful of prickles for his troubles.
As he sat on the stile sucking out the pain, he noticed a Coke can in the long grass. It looked new. He picked it up, looked around. It was too early in the season for hunters. He squashed the can under his boot. Then, having nowhere else to put it, shoved it through the neck hole into Gladys’s head. There was nothing much else in there but rags and pebbles and a few dead moths. He plumped the head back onto her broom-handle neck. It rattled.
He ploughed on, getting more and more worked up. He didn’t like to think of people trespassing on the farm, didn’t like the idea of strangers sneaking around.
He stumbled on down the tractor trail into the woodland that separated the cornfields from the low swampy area. He stopped at the threshold of a shadowy place where the woods closed in tight on the road, forming a canopy that blocked the light.
This was the spot. This was where they found his car.
Jim took a deep breath, let it out slowly. His lungs filled with the heavy fragrance of cedar.
The cops found nothing. No signs of a fight. No cigarette butts, no threads — just Dad’s old Malibu, the first car he had ever bought, the keys in the ignition. Outside there was a footprint or two in the muck. They came from a pair of boots Dad always wore. Matched up exactly with footprints in the barnyard.
After the initial search, volunteers came in droves to help out. Someone found a little tube of lip balm up towards the railway tracks and everyone went crazy as if they’d found a map or something. But it belonged to one of the volunteers who’d combed that part of the woods already. Then, at the fence, they found a tiny fragment of yarn hanging from a barb. The colour matched a sweater Hub had put on that morning. In the swamp land beyond the tracks, they found more of the footprints and, finally, a mile south of the farm, at a water-filled quarry, they found one of his blue handkerchiefs. They dragged the quarry but found no body.
It was as if Hub Hawkins had been spirited away. It was as if God had dropped down in a spacecraft and whisked him off the face of the earth. “Hey, Hub, we’ve got big beaver problems in heaven. The angels are getting the skirts of their robes wet. We could use some first-hand advice.”
Jim smiled, but the smile died on him. It was harder and harder to believe his father might somehow, somewhere, still be alive. Jim remembered the tracker dogs, the choppers, the experts from Toronto, the press.
He looked up as hard and high as he could, but he saw no heaven, no angels with wet skirts. No God.
Gladys’s head fell off again. He stooped to pick it up. “You know what I think, Gladys? I think you’re kind of like God,” he said. “Something we made up to scare off the crows.”
After the authorities had given up, Jim came down here, insane with longing, cursing everyone and everything. He came again and again. Fighting back the fear of what he might find or what might find him.
It was in this cedar glade that he lost his voice. He had been looking around, hoping beyond hope he might spot some clue everyone had overlooked. He had gone to call out his father’s name — only nothing came out of his mouth.
He stopped coming. It had always been a favourite cross-country ski trail. He and his mother found other trails, not that they got out much last winter. In the summer, Lar Perkins came through with his bush hog to keep the trail passable. Never asked to be paid. But Jim never came down this way again. Not until today.
“What do ya think, Gladys?” he said. He waggled her head up and down and heard the Coke can rattle. The sound fired him up again. Then he stepped into the shadows of the glade and passed through to the light on the other side.