Together, they manhandled the fridge and the stove into the parlour. Then she put on a pair of ear-protectors and flipped on the sander. She had only been at it for five minutes when Jim cupped his hands and shouted at her to stop.
The phone was ringing. It was Hec. Ruth Rose had been arrested.
21
Jim listened to Hec without a word, mechanically nodding his head. He thanked him, his voice listless, barely audible.
Then, as Hec was hanging up, Jim thought of something he wanted to say.
“Did she ask after me? I mean, did she want to see me or anything?”
No, she hadn’t. Jim grimaced. Then he hung up and stared at his mother for a moment before he could bring himself to explain. He spoke in a flat monotone.
“She broke into the Blessed T. some time this morning. She was painting slogans all over the walls. The same ones as here. Dickie Patterhew caught her, called the cops.” Iris shook her head sadly. Jim glared at her. “Don’t say it, okay?”
She came and gave him a hug, but he jerked away. “You think Dickie could have held her if she didn’t want to get arrested?” he said. His mother didn’t answer.
“Where is she now?” she asked.
“They’ve got her over at the jail until they can figure out what to do with her.” Even before Jim had finished the statement, his eyes flashed with panic. “Cripes!” he said, and he punched in the phone number at the Expositor again. Dorothy put him through to Hec.
“Hec, it’s me,” said Jim. “You’ve got to tell them not to let Father Fisher take her. Not let him near her.” His mother protested, but Jim turned away and cupped the phone protectively so that she couldn’t take it from him. She stood nearby, her arms folded, frowning. He hardly noticed; he was too busy listening to what Hec had to say.
Finally, he hung up again.
“Jim,” his mother said, “Father is her legal guardian.”
“That’s what Hec said, but it doesn’t matter anyway. They can’t find him. He’s not at home. Dickie says he hasn’t been at the church. He was supposed to speak at some luncheon in Smiths Falls and he never showed up.”
“Maybe he’s doing his rounds — the hospital, the nursing homes?”
Jim raised an eyebrow. “They checked everywhere. He’s gone.”
The two of them stood for a moment in a kind of combative silence. Fisher’s disappearance meant only one thing to Jim. He was on the run. His eyes challenged his mother to say different.
Ultimately, she gave up the staring match, put her ear protectors back on and continued to sand the floor. Jim had been washing the walls in preparation for painting, but he abandoned the task and headed outside. He sat at the table in the garden and tried to imagine Ruth Rose in a cell down at the lock-up behind the court. He imagined her shaking the bars and screaming at the guards. You couldn’t cage someone like Ruth Rose. What would they do with her? He didn’t want to think about it.
Hey, Jim, you’ve got to admit. This is a great idea.
What if it wasn’t an admission, but a declaration? Maybe she hadn’t spray-painted their kitchen. Maybe she just liked the idea enough to borrow it. Was that what she had meant?
Jim walked out into the yard past the old pickup, pounding the grimy cab with his fist as he passed. The sound of the sander was lost to him as he headed across the Twelfth Line, picking his way through the puddles.
Finally he stood on the edge of the road in waist-high goldenrod and dried-up Queen Anne’s lace. Late September had rusted the greenness but tinted everything lavender with wild aster.
He stared northeast up towards the ridge.
Back in the house he marched straight through the kitchen and the parlour to the little room his mother used as an office. There was a sign on the door that read, Action Central, but it was just a cubbyhole of a room, a place where Iris paid bills and kept seed catalogues.
The survey map lay open on the old roll-top desk where he had left it the other day when he had been searching for Mount Tabor. Now he followed his finger until he found the little black square that represented his own house, pushed on up from there to Purvis Poole’s sand and gravel pit and from there worked his way up to the ridge. The contour rings grew closer and closer together with numbers 575, 625, 675 to the highest point of land for miles around, 725. Seven hundred and twenty-five whats? Feet, yards, metres? He didn’t know. But high. And there was a little crossed pickaxe and spade that represented a mine with the word “abandoned” written beside it. There were other mine markers, all abandoned, but none so close, none so handy.
He hadn’t mentioned Mount Tabor to Hec. His story was unbelievable enough without dragging Biblical references into it. But he remembered what Ruth Rose had said about the ridge that very morning.
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” he muttered.
He looked up suddenly. His mother was leaning against the door jamb. He hadn’t even heard the sander stop. She was frowning. Mercifully, it wasn’t a my-son-is-going-crazy kind of frown. More like a there’s-work-to-be-done-and-you’re-goofing-off kind of a frown. He threw down the map and jumped to his feet.
“Sorry,” he said, saluting her as he passed. The last thing he needed now was to have his mother on his case.
They worked hard. Physical labour was not new to either of them but there was more at stake than a job to do. It was like getting back in the saddle when you’ve been thrown, parachuting again after a risky fall. As he painted, Jim thought of the bright red Coke can he had picked up in the back field only a few weeks earlier, how upset it had made him to know that anyone had been walking around on their land. Who would have thought it would come to this?
Once the sanding was finished, they worked in companionable silence. His mother turned on the local country music station but declared it too bouncy. She turned on CBC-2 for classical music, turned it off when the news came on.
By six, they had a first coat of paint on the walls. Jim had peeled the primer paint off the fridge easily enough, and Iris had taken a hand-sander to the table out on the lawn. Apart from the odd splash and smear, the kitchen looked more or less like home again. They planned on giving the walls a second coat that evening, and, if everything went all right, Iris hoped she might even get a first coat of urethane on the floor by bedtime.
“It’s going to look better than ever,” she declared as they cleaned up for supper. She could bounce back, find the good in a bad thing. But Jim wondered if he could. There was no use trying to convince anyone that Ruth Rose was a good thing. He needed proof and he was going to get it.
Refreshed by the effort, Iris surprised Jim by suggesting they pick up a pizza. They never ordered take-out. For one thing, they weren’t all that near anywhere. For another, they simply didn’t have the money for extras.
“Pepperoni and sausage,” said Jim. Iris made a face as if he were driving a hard bargain.
She made the call — pretended she wanted anchovies, just to watch Jim squirm. They were too far in the boonies to have pizza delivered, but Attila the Hungry, down on Highway 7, was less than twenty minutes away. She set off with a tootle of the horn, and Jim waved and headed back to the house.
It was already getting dark, turning cooler. The wind was picking up, jostling the sky around. He breathed out paint fumes, took in a great big lungful of camomile-scented evening.
He hadn’t reached the porch before he heard the sound of an approaching vehicle, a big red, white and blue FedEx van. It was creeping along.
Then, to Jim’s surprise, it turned into their yard. He went over expecting to give directions.