Robert McGill - Once We Had a Country

“Oh, Maggie,” says Brid. “You were doing so well.” Rising from her seat, she turns to Fletcher. “Do whatever you want. Honestly, the only thing I care about is that we buy a TV.”

Fletcher laughs without humour until he realizes she isn’t joking. “I thought we agreed on no television.”

“Sure, except the kid’s bored out of her skull. Speaking of which, where’s the playroom you promised?”

“I told you, as soon as Wale gets here—”

“Yeah, well, that’s the other thing. If he doesn’t show up next week, Pauline and I are going back to Boston.” In the mud room, she scoops up Pauline and carries her outside.

Neither Fletcher nor Maggie looks at the other. Brid’s cigarette burns in the ashtray between them. He reaches out and mashes it.

“Thanks for all your help there.” He speaks the words with a smile, but she can see that he’s hurt.

“I said we should go ahead with it, didn’t I?”

He lowers his gaze, then pushes his chair back and leaves the room. A few seconds later she hears his footsteps on the stairs. She can’t believe it. Instead of following, she snatches up a broom and dedicates herself to sweeping the kitchen.

From the second floor there’s banging and the scraping of heavy objects. It’s too much. Finally she goes up, telling herself she has to vacuum the hall, and discovers he has shut himself in the unfinished playroom where Pauline found the dead birds. He has even taped a piece of paper to the door that reads PLEASE STAY OUT . Fine, then; she’ll go back downstairs and leave him to it.

An hour passes before she hears the door open, then the sound of his footsteps. When he appears, his torso and arms are speckled with white paint and his face gives no sign of anger.

“Come with me,” he says. “I want to show you something.”

Upstairs, the sign has been removed from the door. The space inside is empty aside from an assortment of painting supplies, along with a card table in the middle that holds some large, angular object hidden by a bedsheet. Three of the room’s walls are still covered in green wallpaper, but the fourth is bright white.

“Why did you paint just one wall?”

“Close your eyes,” he says. When she does, she hears him switch off the overhead light, and then a motor grinds into life. When she looks, a beam of light is crossing the room, illuminating eddies of dust. On the newly painted wall is an image of Fletcher, supine in the outbuilding he’s taken to calling the barracks, lifting and lowering a barbell above his chest. There’s no sound except the clack of film through the projector. She remembers framing this scene through the camera’s viewfinder, yet still she isn’t quite able to accept its return in colour and big as life.

“What do you think?” he says, arms circling her waist. “It’s your own projection room. Now we can watch everything you shoot. We’ll make you our documentarian.”

“It’s wonderful,” she replies, and means it. But then she thinks of Brid and feels queasy. “This was supposed to be a playroom,” she points out. “Brid won’t be happy—”

“It can be a playroom too.”

Maggie’s eyes remain focused on the wall, watching the past version of him as he shows Pauline how to make a muscle. When the film ends, Fletcher goes to the projector and flips a switch so that it begins to run backward. He grins as, on the wall, he and Pauline start once more into their motions, now reversed.

“I thought you were angry with me,” admits Maggie.

He squeezes her tight. “I’m sorry things have been heavy. You’re so good to me. I don’t have the means to repay your goodness.”

He speaks so softly and with such affection, it takes her a moment to wonder why he shouldn’t have the means. She tries to look him in the eyes, but he avoids her gaze.

“Things are never going to work, are they?” he says. “Christ, I don’t want to be hiring Jamaicans, but what else can we do? Ask my father to fork out more cash? Maybe Brid’s right—I’m just a rich boy playing up here to avoid the war.”

“Forget Brid,” she replies. The harshness with which she says it seems to disconcert him.

“Oh, it’s not her fault. She comes from a really fucked-up family. That sort of thing messes with your head.”

“You ever think—” She tries to sound lighthearted. “You ever think she has a crush on you?”

“A crush!” he says, and kisses her neck. “Don’t worry, baby, she’s not my type.”

Maggie puzzles over his response. She seems particularly fortunate to have ended up living with two people so sure they’re not each other’s type.

On the screen, the film still runs in reverse. Pauline walks backward from the bathroom to the playroom, approaches three dead birds on the windowsill, and points to them. Then she and the camera retreat down the hall, arriving at a place where another dead bird lies broken on the carpet. Eventually, like magic, it leaps into Maggie’s waiting hand.

Maggie draws a sharp breath.

“What is it?” says Fletcher.

On the wall, the bird is now in Pauline’s cupped fingers and the girl’s crying, tears streaming from her cheeks back into her eyes.

“You didn’t show this to Brid, did you?” Maggie asks. “I haven’t told her about the dead birds.”

Fletcher promises not to say anything, and the two of them stay holding each other as the film winds back to its beginning: the sequence of objects left behind, the glimpses of the outhouse and the decrepit living room. Finally the end of the film flaps against the reel and the wall becomes a slate of light. Once he’s turned off the projector, they make their way to the bedroom. When they emerge and descend sheepishly to the kitchen, Brid and Pauline are already eating dinner.

“At it again, huh?” says Brid.

After the meal, while Brid’s tucking in Pauline, Maggie takes the scissors and Scotch tape from the kitchen to her new screening room, turns on the projector, and runs it until she reaches the scene with the birds. Very carefully she cuts it out, then tapes the remaining film back together. It seems too easy, but when she runs it again, her taping job holds; the film simply moves from the previous scene to the next. She’s glad, but somehow she can’t quite bear the thought of throwing away the excised strip, so she rolls it up, goes to the bedroom closet, and nestles it in the pocket of her winter coat.

Her first camera was a Kodak Brownie Starflash, black plastic with a built-in flash gun, the socket for the bulb haloed by a silver dish above the lens. Her father gave her the camera for her tenth birthday, even though Gran told him the thing was too grown-up for a girl her age. Thereafter Maggie took revenge on her grandmother by repeatedly skulking through Gran’s house and lying in wait until the old woman came into range. Then Maggie pressed the button and a smack of light caught Gran full in the face. Gran shrieked exquisitely every time, her howls of indignation following Maggie across the lawn during the scamper home, the camera on its strap swinging against Maggie’s breastbone with a pain she accepted as her due for such wickedness. Each time she thumbed through a packet of newly developed photographs, she took a special pleasure from the shots of Gran’s face drained of colour, garish, poorly framed, her expression somewhere between terror and outrage.

The rest of the photographs were always of Maggie’s father, because at that age Maggie assumed that photos had to be of people, and because taking pictures of him was so simple and satisfying. Those moments when she held him in the viewfinder were the only times she could look at him without feeling overwhelmed by the melancholy in his eyes.

What the camera never showed was the long scar on his neck from a piece of shrapnel when the Nazis almost got him in the war. Maggie had seen the scar only a few times, and the story wasn’t one her father liked to tell, so she’d been left to read about D-Day on her own and picture the invasion, the rough sailing and frigid waters, the hours of bleeding before a medic finally arrived to help him. The history books described it as one of the most important events in American history, yet her father never marched in the Veterans Day parade, and the scar was his only ribbon. He hid it behind high collars or under scarves that made him look like Roy Rogers with a beard. When he went out, people stared; it was no wonder that, except for his job, he mostly stayed at home.