Robert McGill - Once We Had a Country

“Do you ask these questions to punish me?” he demands. “Or to punish yourself?”

“I don’t care what happens, I’m resigned to it,” she says. Turning onto her back, she asks, “You think Velma’s had lovers?”

There’s a flicker of impatience on his face. “Seven years for me in Canada,” he replies, “six months apart each year. Long time to be lonely.”

Maggie cogitates on these words. She tells him he should go back to the barracks, and he says he doesn’t want to.

“Go,” she insists. “Think about your beautiful wife and children.”

“Don’t say such things. You had a sad day. I want to be with you.”

“Why? What can you do?” He tries to hold her, but she shrugs him off. “You should leave. It’s good practice for later.”

He lets his head drop heavily on the pillow. “All right, if you insist—”

When he starts to get up, though, she grabs his leg.

“Wait, not yet!”

And laughing quietly, he falls back to the bed.

That night in her dreams, she’s at the Syracuse airport again, waiting for her father’s ashes to arrive. The plane lands, and with its appearance her trepidation begins to build. The aircraft taxis down the runway, stopping some distance from her, and passengers start to disembark, a line of tourists in Bermuda shorts along with soldiers in uniform. Maggie hopes that this time her father will appear among them, but there’s no sign, only a pair of men in dark suits who wait ominously by the tail. Maggie doesn’t want to be here. When she wills herself to turn, something won’t let her. She tries to scream and discovers that fear has stopped up her mouth.

A shadow falls across the ground. Someone’s standing behind her. His voice speaks into her ear.

“Who are you waiting for, little girl?”

At the moment his hand clutches her neck, she leaps awake.

All morning, Brid doesn’t leave her room. Maggie putters in the kitchen while terrible images run through her head, but she’s afraid to go upstairs and knock, fearful that Brid will sense the reason. Maggie shouldn’t have let her come. Half the time she can barely get out of bed herself; how can she be expected to look after someone else? Brid took pills, for God’s sake. In a panic, Maggie goes upstairs and clears out the medicine cabinet.

Afterward, she stands in the hall by Brid’s room listening for signs of life. When she hears the creak of bedsprings, she decides she’s had enough. An impulse has been growing in her ever since she awoke, but until now she hasn’t been able to act. Now she goes to her bedroom and retrieves the Super 8 camera, loads it with film, and carries it into the orchard.

The weight of the strap on her shoulder feels out of sync with the season. The trees around her should be green-leaved, the air sweltering and alive with voices, but there are only dark clouds and a chill breeze promising winter. Hoses have been put away for the year, while the branches of the cherry trees are bare and pruned. The pumpkins were harvested weeks ago. A lone relic remains on the porch, skull-faced and caving in on itself, welcoming costumed kids who never came.

The camera in her hands feels alien and ill-intentioned. For whom would she be filming, anyway? Not for Fletcher. Not for any child of theirs. Not for Maggie’s father. He’ll never see this place. Her father is buried dust. He’s a roll of banknotes. Gran’s right: Maggie should have replied to his letters. She shouldn’t have let him go in the first place.

Walking up and down the orchard lanes, she looks for things to film. The ground is muddy, and George Ray has laid out planks on which to pass over the worst stretches. As she makes her way across, she thinks about her calls to him this week, the late night whispering down the line in Gran’s kitchen. It was amazing how much solace Maggie took from hearing his voice, when two months ago they barely knew each other.

All she knows about her father’s death comes from the priest at the mission. On the phone, he told her that there’d been an opium deal with Yia Pao as the middleman, that her father had been an innocent bystander who was kidnapped when the deal went wrong. The man in the State Department who talked to Maggie after she sent them Wale’s letter was unable to confirm the existence of a man named Sal, and he didn’t put much stock in Wale’s story. He called it hearsay from a deserter.

Her father’s body was found miles from anywhere, in a region so depopulated by bombing that news of his death didn’t reach the authorities for weeks. A month had passed by the time Gran and Maggie found out. The weekend of the Labour Day party at the farm, her father was likely dead already. There was no coroner’s report or police investigation to tell them what happened for certain; death in Laos is too common for that. There has been no sign of Yia Pao, either, and no trace of the gang that kidnapped them. There’s only the priest’s account of what was discovered: her father, still warm; the infant, barely living. The priest said Maggie’s father must have escaped his captors, because how else could he have ended up with the baby in the jungle? She doesn’t know, and Wale hasn’t surfaced to tell her. No word in two months, nothing since his letter. But somehow he must have been involved in what happened. Maybe he’s too ashamed to get in touch, or maybe he’s dead and nobody will ever reveal the truth. No one will tell her what to do with the ten thousand dollars in the statue of Saint Clare.

Maggie hasn’t put it in a bank, hasn’t spent a dime of it, just hid it in the attic and hasn’t breathed a word, not even to George Ray. She can’t go to the police, because what if they seize the money and her father intended it for a purpose? It was tempting to tell Gran, if only to disrupt all the talk of holy martyrdom, but Maggie has no desire to tarnish her father’s reputation. She wants to believe that somehow he didn’t know what was in the statue, that he was smarter than to get involved with criminals and send so much money through the mail. Except he must have known. Maybe he was in on some scheme with Yia Pao; maybe her father double-crossed him. Maybe he felt reckless and didn’t care if he was caught.

These possibilities have to be considered, because on her nightstand lies his final letter, now read over many times, damning him with its guile. We’re all His vessels , he wrote, sealed up in ourselves . A hint disguised as theology, spelling out his guilt. Did he want her to spend the money, or did he plan on coming back and claiming it? Sometimes she thinks the only fair thing would be to give it over for the care of Yia Pao’s son, but when she wrote the priest at the mission, he replied that he didn’t know where the child was, and he warned it would be foolish of her to come searching for him.

The priest’s right. What does she know of Laos? That it’s cold at night in the mountains where they found her father but tropical and humid in the valleys, hot enough for those who handle the dead to forgo embalming. Instead, they burn bodies on pyres and send the ashes of foreigners back on planes.

If she could do so without guilt, she’d use the money to purchase the farm. There’s no other way she can afford it. Her father’s debts will gobble up the life insurance payout, even if the company makes good. They’re claiming his policy was voided when he entered a war zone. They say it was tantamount to suicide, and maybe they aren’t wrong.

She has walked half the orchard without stopping once to film. The camera’s strap digs into her shoulder. Ahead of her is the farthest corner of the farm, where the perimeter fence ends and the corrugated metal of the wrecking yard wall begins. Nothing grows along it; the soil is stained rusty orange and reeks of gasoline.