“I wish I was an artist,” he said. “I’d draw you.” He began to dry her with a stiff towel. “God, your dad’s loud. Maybe I’ll sleep outside the door.”
“You’ll get used to it,” Delphine said. “You’ll be surprised. Just think of it as something in nature.”
“His snoring?”
“Like a storm, a big lake. Trees.”
The spluttering and thrashing that Cyprian now heard did not seem natural, and he doubted that he could take Delphine’s advice. But once he lay down and curled around her, he fell directly into a fabulous well of sleep in which he dreamed phenomenally. He dreamed of trees with their limbs cracked and creaking in wind, of hopping from ice floe to floe in a roaring torrent, of a sneaky gunpowder booby trap that blew up every time he tried to talk.
In the dream, he spoke freely to Delphine between the blasts of noise.
And what did I say, he wondered, waking slightly before he was sucked again into the black current of unconsciousness. What did I tell her? What does she know? For he hadn’t yet dared raise the subject of what she had seen or not seen back by the river in Manitoba. And it had happened so soon after that night — they’d never talked about that either — when they looked into each other’s eyes and their bodies had moved together in a way beyond anything they could have wished. Were they in love now, or had things drastically changed? Was she really his little sister, and the noisy drunk next bed over his new father? Perhaps, he thought, bobbing to the surface well before dawn, the smell had addled them all. Perhaps they were affected by the smell’s range and power. They would see. They would contend with it come morning.
THE SMELL CAME AT THEM as they slowly approached down the road. It seemed to have settled in a tent about the house. They went inside to battle it and immediately rushed back out. It was as though they hadn’t even touched the place yet, or worse, as though they’d only succeeded in lifting the lid off the source of the odor, which still emanated, Cyprian thought, from the cleared-off floor.
“Or maybe the cellar,” said Delphine with a childlike shudder.
The cellar was no more than a large pit in the earth, underneath the pantry. There was a hole cut in the floor and a hinged door with a ring that turned to lock it shut, but Delphine never opened it in the first place, if she could help it. She and Roy had hardly ever accumulated a surplus of food to store there, though often enough Roy had stashed his booze on the rough shelves cut into the sides of earth. Once upon a time, she remembered, there were potatoes in a large bin or maybe turnips. Otherwise, it was a ghastly place filled with spiders. It was probably the source of the bugs and rat droppings.
“I don’t want to look,” said Delphine.
“I don’t either,” said Cyprian.
“Now is the time to burn the place,” she decided.
“Let’s have a smoke.”
They went back to the beer crates and lighted up. From behind, the house was so small and pathetic looking that it seemed impossible for it to harbor such a fierce animosity of odor. Long ago, Delphine had painted the doors and window frames blue because she’d heard that certain tribes believed that blue scared off ghosts. What she’d really wanted was a color to scare off drunks. But there wasn’t such a color. They came anyway, all through her childhood and on into her clever adolescence, during which she’d won a state spelling contest. Her winning word was syzygy. She spelled it on instinct and had to look the meaning up afterward.
The truth was, Delphine was smart — in fact, she was the smartest girl in school. She could have had a scholarship to a Catholic college, but she dropped out early. It was the planets, aligned as in her spelling word, casting their shadows indifferently here and there. Malign influence. She slowly became convinced, due to her association with her father’s cronies, that at the center of the universe not God but a tremendous deadness reigned. The stillness of a drunk God, passed out cold.
She had learned of it in that house with the blue-framed doors and windows, where the drunks crashed, oblivious to warding-off charms and dizzy indigo. Things had happened to her there. She was neither raped nor robbed, nor did she experience God’s absence to any greater degree than other people did. She wasn’t threatened or made to harm anyone against her will. She wasn’t beaten, either, or deprived of speech or voice. It was, rather, the sad blubbering stories she heard in the house. Delphine witnessed awful things occurring to other humans. Worse than that, she was powerless to alter their fate. It would be that way all her life — disasters, falling like chairs all around her, falling so close they disarranged her hair, but not touching her.
Perhaps the early loss of her mother had caused her to undergo a period of intolerable sensitivity. Although the actual mishaps struck visitors, friends, acquaintances, strangers, Delphine experienced the feelings that accompanied their awful misfortunes. A child down the road was struck blind. For weeks Delphine found herself groping her way through the nightmare in which she was told she was blind as well. Or abandoned by her husband, as was the cheerful and sordid Mrs. Vashon, who tried to kill herself at the prospect of raising nine children alone, did not succeed, but ever after bore the rope’s dark scorch mark around her neck. Or her best friend from high school, Clarisse Strub, who was victimized by a secret disease. These things happened with such regularity that Delphine developed a nervous twitch in her brain. A knee-jerk response that rejected hope and light.
Not that she ever railed at God. From the time she’d understood God wouldn’t give her her mother back, she knew that was a waste of time. Because it offended her to swallow as many as twenty or thirty lies per day, she quit school in her final year. God was all good. Lie! God was all powerful. All right, maybe. But if so, then clearly not all good, since He let her mother die. All merciful? Lie. Just? Lie. All seeing? Had He really the time to watch what her hands did beneath the covers at night? Did God really invade her brain and weep at her impure thoughts? And if so, why had He concentrated on such trivia rather than curing her mother of her illness? What sort of choice was that? Delphine counted and even wrote the lies down in the margins of her textbooks and library books. Lies! More lies! She wrote so fiercely that for the next five years the nuns would admonish their students both to disregard and to bring to their attention any books bearing handwritten annotations.
Her father was pleased enough. As soon as he learned she’d quit school, he quit life and proceeded to pursue his own serious drinking, while Delphine went to work. Well, maybe she shouldn’t have been so smart, she admitted. Maybe better to endure the tyranny of lies than the series of jobs she had then, briefly, held. She had wrapped butter in the Ogg Dairy. She had worked cracking eggs, gasping at the sulfur whiplash of the rotten ones. For a while she had sorted cookies into metal troughs, survived on the crumbs. Ran a buttonholer in a dress shop. She ironed. Blistered her hands in bleach laundering sheets. All these jobs were tedious and low-paying. Besides, since she lived at home, her father tried to appropriate half her money.
The first time she split her pay cash, he quietly used it to drink somewhere else. The next time, he brought his buddies home. She arrived home — lame, dusty, exhausted, from sorting bricks at the brickworks — to find them drinking a case of skin tonic. Although she tried her best to ignore them, they made a ruckus, ate every morsel, even the last bit of the ham, and in a half stupor blundered into her bedroom, which was her only haven. She took a broom to them, cracking the handle against their legs. When they guffawed and refused to leave, a storm of white dots fell across her vision. At long last, she decided to clear them out. She walked out to the woodpile, yanked the ax from its block, strode back into the kitchen.