After a few minutes, Jim stopped rifling through the stuff in a random kind of way and took out a huge armful. Sitting cross-legged on the rag carpet, he started a more thorough search.
Here were his father and mother when they were young, dressed up for some formal, standing beside the Malibu. Here was Jim with Hub at the curling club’s annual father-and-son bonspiel. Here was his father pretending to saw Jim’s bike in half with a chainsaw. Jim laughed.
He got out a second and a third armful, sorting the older pictures into a separate pile and then studying them carefully.
Finally, he hit pay dirt. A black-and-white snapshot of three boys in T-shirts sitting on the front stoop of an old log cabin squinting into the light. On the back someone had written: “The Three Musketeers.” And under it: “Frankie,’Fish’ and little Hub.”
Little Hub Hawkins was in shorts. His bare feet didn’t even reach the ground. He looked about twelve. Fish was a teenager, a senior by the size of him. He was leaning against the stoop with his chest puffed out and his arms crossed like Mr. Clean. Frankie was pointing at him and laughing. Frankie was older than Hub and younger than Fish and kind of gawky looking. His hair looked white in the photo — the colour of sunlight on a window. Fish’s hair was black, longish with wide sideburns, like pictures Jim had seen from the sixties. Father Fisher’s hair was the same colour now, though not so long.
That was when the phone rang.
Jim nearly jumped out of his skin. He got up awkwardly, his legs filled with pins and needles. He hobbled into the kitchen to the wall phone above the table. Glancing at the clock, he saw that it was almost midnight.
Who would be phoning so late? The phone rang again, too loud in the silent house.
Dad.
The thought made his knees buckle.
He’s phoning to tell us where he is, why he left so suddenly, why he didn’t even say goodbye.
On the eleventh ring, it suddenly occurred to Jim that it might be the factory to say his mother had been injured. That broke the spell. He snapped up the phone and spoke into the receiver breathlessly, as if he had run a mile.
“Hello?”
The voice at the other end of the phone whispered, “Did you talk to him? Did you tell him anything?”
Jim didn’t speak. He guessed who it was, but he was too stunned to say a word.
“What’s the matter? Is there someone there?”
Jim didn’t answer.
“Say’you’ve got the wrong number’ if there’s somebody there and I’ll get back to you some other time.”
Jim swallowed and took a deep breath. “You’re scaring me,” he said, sounding like a six-year-old.
Now it was her turn to go silent, and in the silence Jim heard a man’s voice. The voice said, “Ruth Rose?” Then there was nothing but a sharp click and a dial tone.
5
Jim was tired all the next day but after school he dropped off his backpack at home, changed into his grubby clothes and set off for the beaver dam, bent on recovering the shovel he had left behind and undoing whatever the beavers might have gotten up to overnight.
Ruth Rose beat him to it. He could hear her singing to herself good and loud.
There was nothing to stop him from heading back home. But as he stood listening he realized she was straining at something as she sang. So he made his way soundlessly through the sopping wet grass until he caught sight of her.
She was hacking away at the dam, the same cavity he had worked at the day before. But she wasn’t using his shovel. It was leaning against a tree along with Gladys. She was using a pickaxe, and she wasn’t squeamish about it, either.
She swung it high above her head and brought it down into the guck up to its hilt. She had muscle, all right. She hauled at the axe and brought up a great gob of putrefied vegetation. The water spilled into the crevice and on through the busted dam but not with much force. By now, it was good and low.
She stopped singing. Without looking back, she said in a good clear voice, “You might as well come out. You’re not going to catch me giving Gladys a soaker.”
Jim blushed. He stood up tall, stepped out into the open and made his way towards her. Her red T-shirt was stained with sweat and splatters of mud. He looked out across the flats where the water had been so high just the day before.
“You did a good job,” he managed to say.
She scrinched up her nose, rubbed it, looking a little flustered, as if she wasn’t used to compliments. “The beavers didn’t do any building last night, as far as I could tell. I guess Gladys deserves some of the credit.”
Jim laughed nervously.
Ruth Rose came down off the dam and made her way towards him with her pickaxe over her shoulder like one of the seven dwarfs, but which one? Grumpy? Dopey? Crazy?
“Did you carry that all the way from town?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “There was a work crew on the tracks. They gave me a lift.” He wondered, from the hesitant way she said it, whether maybe she had stolen the pickaxe.
She put it down and went to get Gladys, planting her in the spot at the mouth of the breach where Jim had placed her the day before. She made Gladys wave to him. Jim gulped. Waved back.
“Care to give her another dousing?” Ruth Rose said. “I won’t peek this time, promise.”
Jim turned red.
“It’s your call,” she said.
There was something altogether different about her manner today. She joined him again and they walked up the lane a bit, found a dry log and sat down.
“I’m on my medication,” she said, as if she had been reading his mind. “Bummer, eh? Just when it looks like I’m a human being after all, it turns out I’m a real nut-case who has to be drugged.”
He looked at her and there was a glassy look in her eyes.
She looked down, picked up a small branch, broke it twig by twig.
“This isn’t the real me,” she said. “But the thing is, the fiend you met yesterday wasn’t the real me, either. I’m a mess, okay? I hate the drugs, but if I don’t take them like a good girl…”
She didn’t finish the sentence.
“I didn’t talk to Father yesterday,” said Jim. “Honest.” He told her about the pastor being at the house when he got back. “Did you get in trouble?”
She smiled a kind of loopy smile. “I’m always in trouble.”
Jim looked sideways at her. “Does he hit you?”
Then she really laughed. “It’s much worse than that. You know what he does when I’m being recalcitrant, as he puts it?” Ruth Rose leaned up close. “He prays for me.”
She seemed to enjoy the surprise on his face. “He just drops to his knees, right there — wherever it is — and folds his hands in front of his face and he starts in praying for my recalcitrant soul. That’s what he did last night. Once he did it in the middle of a supermart. In the canned vegetable aisle.”
Jim shook his head in astonishment, “That must be awful.”
She nodded and was silent. “He prays all the time.” Then she smirked. “Like a hawk.”
The sky was plugged up with clouds, the temperature was dropping. Jim noticed that now that she wasn’t working anymore, Ruth Rose was shivering, her narrow shoulders up high, her shoulder blades sticking out like wings.
“I’ll get your jacket,” he said.
Her black leather jacket was hanging from a poplar bough. Something on the lapel glittered with reflected light. A mirror the size of a campaign button. She had been watching for him.
He looked at himself in the mirror. The pimple on his nose said he was fourteen. The bewilderment in his eyes said he was going on four.