Robert McGill - Once We Had a Country

She found it strange to hear him talk of travel. He subscribed to National Geographic and liked telling her of the places he read about, but he never talked of visiting them, either by himself or together, and she didn’t mind. The idea of travelling with him didn’t seem right. She wanted to do it by herself one day.

But what she said was, “You’ll come with me.”

“I couldn’t afford it.”

“I’ll pay, then. I won’t leave you by yourself.” She hoped it was what he needed to hear, but he only looked more dejected.

“You’re leaving in the fall,” he said.

She gritted her teeth. So that was why he’d mentioned travel. She should have known.

“Boston isn’t so far,” she said, as if he didn’t know where Boston was. “I’ll come home on weekends.” At this, he only shook his head.

Suddenly his presence in her doorway was too much. She needed him to be downstairs in his easy chair. She wanted to be wearing her normal clothes and sitting on the couch. “I don’t have to go,” she heard herself say. “Maybe I could still get into Syracuse.”

He didn’t look up from the carpet. “You need to see the world. I’ve been a selfish father.”

Did he want her to go or not? When she went to hug him, she felt him shiver. Why was her father shivering? He shook like a little boy who knew a terrible secret.

“I should have sent you off on trips,” he said. “I should have made you get some distance.”

A year later, in Boston, she had a chance encounter with a girl from high school, someone whose name Maggie had already forgotten. The girl told her Peter Leggat had burnt his draft card and moved to San Francisco with flowers in his hair. This bit of gossip was followed by a long, sly look. Not for the first time, Maggie wondered what Peter had told people to explain his inviting her to the prom. Perhaps in San Francisco she still had a walkon role in the stories he related. Maybe, as he told it now, she was the last girl he’d tried before giving up and heading west. Perhaps she played the same sort of crucial, casual role in his personal history that he seemed to play in hers.

Maggie thinks of telling Fletcher about her encounter with Wale in the playroom but decides he already has enough to manage. Each day seems to bring him into conflict with people on the farm. Those on the payroll begrudge the chores he assigns them, while those who aren’t being paid don’t bother with his labour schemes at all and entice the others to movie matinees in St. Catharines or the beach at Port Dalhousie. In bed he complains to her that Dimitri’s the main culprit, setting a bad example with his truant walks in search of John-John. Fletcher complains about the garbage everywhere, the mud on the floors, the noise from record players and car stereos, the shouting and laughing downstairs that make it hard to sleep, until he and Maggie end up arguing over which of them should go tell people to be quiet. In the mornings, there are often bodies asleep in the hall, and many residents of the barracks don’t get up until noon. Fletcher starts going out to the building before breakfast, rapping on the door and hollering hellos, poking people awake.

His shortwave radio goes missing, then his welding torch. She tells him not to take it personally, but it’s no good. At meetings, he battles with Dimitri, who hasn’t lost interest in debating. While Fletcher sits with pens and sheaves of notes laid out on the coffee table like weapons, Dimitri takes equine strides around the room and sweeps the hair from his forehead. He wants a credit system to apportion the work more fairly. Fletcher wants to ban drugs and set a nightly curfew. The number of Fletcher’s supporters shrinks with each meeting, and half-jokingly Dimitri takes to calling him Captain Morgan. Brid, whose vote cannot be depended upon by either man, rolls her eyes a lot. It makes for compelling film but is hard on Fletcher’s nerves. He vents his anger watching TV coverage of the Republican convention. One night Maggie catches him before the bathroom mirror speaking to invisible assailants.

“Get lost,” he says. “Why can’t you leave me alone?”

She steps back from the door with a pang, glad nobody else is there to see him. Her period’s a week late, and she has been wanting to tell him about it, but when he’s in such a state it seems unfair to burden him. She’s been late before to no consequence. It would be easier on the pill, except the pill didn’t agree with her, and anyhow they’re so careful—always the diaphragm or a condom. Probably it’s just stress. She hasn’t been eating well.

The next morning, he awakens her, already in the middle of a rant. When she asks him what’s wrong, he flings a piece of paper onto the bed.

“A complaints letter! I found it under our door. They can’t write me a complaints letter—it’s a fucking commune! Dimitri’s behind this, I know it.”

She looks over the page. “Some of these things might be reasonable.”

“Like what?”

“Like not enough vegetarian meals—”

“That’s Rhea. Goddamn Rhea and Dimitri. Why do we have all those meetings if they’re going to bitch behind my back? I swear, they only came here to ruin things. Dimitri’s got a chip on his shoulder the size of Cape Cod.”

Maggie thinks of asking him what he knows about Dimitri and speed, but she only rubs his back and tells him it will be fine. She says everyone’s trying to make the farm better. She tells him to focus on the happy things.

And she’s right, too: in some ways it isn’t so bad. The lettuce she planted after the hurricane is flourishing. The pumpkins have begun to spread tendrils beyond the borders of their allotment. On warm evenings after sunset, she and Fletcher walk hand in hand down the orchard’s central lane, and sometimes through the fading dusk they see pairs of bodies lying together under the trees. There’s the luminescence of bare legs, the undulation of a head. At first she’s startled by such sights, even as part of her stirs, but she comes to take them as propitious, signs that together all of them have created something good.

The last week of August has arrived when one morning she goes upstairs to find George Ray standing there in his orange toque, knocking on her bedroom door. As far as she knows, he has never set foot in the house before, and he looks uncomfortable standing in it now.

“Sorry to be a bother,” he says. “I was hoping to speak with you. Will you come outside?” She nods and follows him down to the porch. After glancing in all directions, he continues onto the lawn before turning to her.

“Top secret, huh?” she says, trying to sound lighthearted, but he doesn’t smile, only keeps his eyes on the house as he speaks.

“I had an encounter last night,” he says. “Near midnight, in the orchard.”

She frowns, confused. “What were you doing out there?”

“Taking a walk. I do it most nights before bed.”

Maggie thinks again of the others in the barracks. “Are the people out there too loud? At a meeting we agreed on no noise after eleven—”

“They’re fine. The walk is good for me.” He doesn’t sound as if he’s being honest, but she can tell he’s not interested in arguing the point.

“So what happened in the orchard?” she says.

He speaks in a low voice. “Some time ago you told me about a pair of girls next door.” She nods, remembering.

“Last night I met them out there. They were by the wrecking yard wall, smoking up with a man from this place.”

“Who?” Her first thought is that it was Fletcher. No, it couldn’t have been. He was lying beside her all night.

“You have to understand,” says George Ray, “I didn’t wish to intrude on them. It was dark and I stumbled upon them before I could turn back.”