Robert McGill: Once We Had a Country

With a box of cleaning supplies from the camper, she returns to the kitchen and begins to scrub the counter. After only a few seconds she’s brought up short by the faint rotten-egg odour of natural gas. Sniffing around the stovetop, she can’t locate the source. She’s on her hands and knees, poking her nose behind the oven, when she hears Fletcher enter from the hallway.

“Did you see the mess in the living room?” he says. She backs out and finds him standing there in only his jeans, holding a paper bag from the van. “By the way, don’t drink the water. We’re supposed to boil everything until the well has been tested.”

She frowns and shows him her palms, already dark with grime. “Can you smell gas? There must be a leak.”

He takes a whiff of air, then shrugs. “A little gas odour’s normal in these old houses.”

“We should call somebody. You said Morgan Sugar would cover repairs, right?”

“Sure, if it comes to that. I was hoping we could handle most stuff ourselves.”

He rummages through the bag in his hands until he’s found a package of licorice sticks. Then he sits at the table and starts eating one of them, gazing meditatively at the ceiling while Maggie opens and shuts cupboard doors with a bang. Whoever lived here last, they haven’t just left furniture. There’s a Mason jar full of paper clips, along with some dishes that make a set only insofar as every one of them is chipped. The shelves are littered with mouse turds, and the first drawer she opens slides off its rails, then refuses to go back on. Something foul is encased in a bag at the bottom of the freezer, welded to the interior. She squirts disinfectant and gives it a few swipes with a sponge while Fletcher goes on chewing his licorice.

Her head starts to hurt. She should stop and sit down, but a voice in her mind insists that she gave up everything to come to this place. She quit teaching, broke her lease. She let her father go to Laos by himself; she let him call her every name in the book before he left. Also, taking over the farm was her idea. For years she’d heard stories about people dropping out, moving to the countryside, living closer to the land, and it always sounded like something she’d like to try. But she never did anything about it. In high school she didn’t even march for civil rights or against the war; she stayed at home with her father and watched the demonstrations on TV. At college in Boston she didn’t campaign for Hubert Humphrey, didn’t vote. She kept her head down and studied. Fletcher has said it was the same with him back then, always playing it straight. Now they have a house of their own and two hundred acres of fertile earth. They have a chance to catch up with the times, and she doesn’t want to miss out.

But her head is throbbing. It’s the gas fumes, must be. She slumps against the counter and massages her temples.

“Probably there’s no point calling the cops about the mess,” says Fletcher. “They’d just bawl us out for leaving the key under the mat.” He looks up. “Hey, what’s wrong?”

Before he can come over to her, a car horn honks and she starts upright. The floor’s filthy; the thing’s still stuck to the bottom of the freezer.

“Go,” she says, waving him out of the kitchen. “She’ll need help.” He touches her cheek before he leaves.

She wipes down the kitchen table, then makes her way to the front of the house, smoothing back her hair. Through the screen door she sees slim, blond Brid standing in profile beside her Toyota, eyes hidden behind sunglasses, hands on hips, and shoulder blades jutting behind her like the stumps of wings. Pauline’s still in the car, strapped into her safety seat and dandling a doll on her knee, its curly flaxen hair very like that of the girl.

As Maggie steps onto the porch, she hears Brid remark to Fletcher, “You haven’t even unpacked the van yet? What have you two been doing?” A smooth blend of innuendo and condemnation.

“Aw shucks,” says Fletcher in a fake Southern drawl, slouching with his hands in his pockets.

“What took you so long?” Maggie calls out. “Border trouble?”

“Are you kidding?” Brid replies. “The guards were so polite, it was like I was doing them a favour by entering the country. The holdup was at the grocery store.” She points to a clutch of bags in the back of the Toyota. “You know this place has a two-dollar bill?”

Maggie looks over to Fletcher and finds him studying Brid’s face, with her bright red lips and her cheeks that for three years have kept their postpartum lustre. Then he realizes Maggie has caught him staring. Losing his slouch, he starts to unload groceries from the car.

“Put those in the kitchen,” Maggie tells him, and immediately she feels stupid for saying it.

“Good boy!” Brid adds with a smirk. Fletcher lets out a series of cheerful barks, then disappears inside. “It’s important to get them trained early,” she says to Maggie. “Otherwise they piss on the rug.”

There’s no time to respond, to be offended, even to laugh. Brid’s too quick for her. Already she’s gone around the car to lift Pauline from her safety seat.

“Sweetie, you’re so patient!” Brid says to the girl. “There you go, free of your shackles, safe in Canada. Just like who? Remember?”

“The slaves,” replies Pauline, her attention elsewhere. When Brid sets her on the ground, she runs across the lawn after a butterfly, dragging her doll by its leg.

“Any sign of Wale?” Brid asks, and Maggie shakes her head.

“Someone took the key from under the mat, though.”

“Maybe he got here early, then ran off with it. That would be typical.”

“Fletcher thinks it was just some kids,” says Maggie. “Besides, I thought Wale wasn’t turning up till next week.”

“Sure, sure,” says Brid. “But with that son of a bitch—well, you never know, do you?” Taking a suitcase in each hand, she starts toward the house and calls out to Pauline, “Honey, leave the bug alone. Let’s find Uncle Fletcher.”

“Don’t let her into the kitchen yet,” says Maggie. “There’s some kind of gas smell.” Seeing Brid’s look of alarm, she adds, “Fletcher says it’s always like that with old houses. Oh, and he says don’t drink the water. We have to boil it until the well’s tested.”

“I’ll talk to him,” says Brid coolly.

Maggie feels a shamefaced pleasure at what she’s done, knowing this woman won’t put up with toxic fumes and polluted wells. She follows her into the house and finds it’s over even before she reaches the kitchen. The whole exchange—more of a shouted monologue, really—grows louder as she approaches. She hears Brid say, “Pauline and I are sleeping in the camper until you get it fixed.” Then Brid glides back down the hall, trailing Pauline behind her. As they pass, Brid’s eyes glint at Maggie with satisfaction.

In the kitchen, Fletcher leans against the counter and Maggie returns to cleaning surfaces.

“I’m going to drive into Virgil,” he declares after a while. “See if there’s a gas repairman.” Maggie pushes her sponge across the table and nods.

After he leaves the room, she hears the thud of cases and boxes being set down in the foyer, along with snatches of conversation between him and Brid. Eventually the camper’s engine starts, then fades, and he’s gone. There’s no sign of Brid and Pauline either, only a quiet that grows thicker with the heat, and a yellow blotch that taunts Maggie from the middle of the floor. On her knees, she scrubs hard at it until she discovers it has crept onto her hands, jaundicing her skin, the blotch not a material thing at all but a macula of light thrown there by a square of stained glass above the mud room door.

Following a sudden inclination, she tosses her sponge into the sink and goes to the foyer. Among the unloaded contents of the van she finds the shoulder bag holding the Super 8 camera. Taking it up to the bedroom she recently occupied with Fletcher, she closes the door behind her, loads a fresh film cartridge, and starts to record, casting the lens methodically about her. The mattress, the pile of sheets, the crack running clear across the plaster ceiling. From the belly of the mechanism comes the soft whirr of film unspooling and respooling, first dark, now etched with light. Beyond this hum there’s nothing to indicate that a miracle is taking place, that the device is absorbing the visible world. When the film runs out, she sets the camera on the mattress feeling purged, ready to clean again.