Robert McGill - Once We Had a Country

The shelf holding the clay statue is next to the window. Maggie makes her way toward it carefully with arms out to balance. One misstep and she’ll go crashing headlong through to the playroom. As she teeters across the rafters, the choice to hide the thing up here seems worse and worse. The little saint seems to taunt her. When she finally picks it up, the statue holds a low heat from sitting in the sunlight. By its weight she thinks the money’s still inside, but repeated shaking brings no confirmation. It was a mistake to have resealed the thing; now she’ll have to smash it again.

Before she can act on the thought, she hears the groan of the stepladder. She turns and sees George Ray’s head pop up through the trap door.

“What happened to the tour?” she asks, quickly setting the statue back in place.

“Brid was worried about you. I agreed to see how you’re doing.”

Heaving himself into the attic, he approaches across the beams, showing none of her fear or caution. When he reaches her, he picks up the statue from the shelf and turns it over, examining the squibs of dried glue that seeped from the cracks when she pressed the thing back together. She resists a desire to snatch it from him.

“When did it break?” he asks, and she says she can’t remember. “Tired of having it downstairs?”

“It—it was painful to see every day.” It’s not a lie, exactly. “We should go back down.”

“Wait. Will you tell me about the graffiti first?”

Maggie feels her face grow hot with blood. “You saw it?”

“Just before lunch.”

“But I painted it out.”

“It needs another coat.” His voice carries the hint of a reprimand, as if she should have told him.

“I didn’t want to bother you. It’s probably just Frank Dodd’s daughter getting up to no good.” She explains about the can of spray paint the girl had that night in the summer.

“But why would she write those words?” he asks.

Maggie shrugs, avoiding his eyes.

“Perhaps it was someone else,” he says. “You could call the police.”

“I don’t want to cause a fuss.” She finds her gaze returning to the statue in his hand.

“Oh, Maggie,” he says softly, “do you ever cause a fuss?”

The statement takes her aback. It’s something Brid would say; Maggie doesn’t want to hear it from him.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean, you lose your papa and you keep it in.” His tone is compassionate, but that only makes it worse. “Soon I’ll leave too, and—”

“You think I don’t care about my father? You think I don’t care about you going?”

“I know you do. But you keep in all those feelings.”

“We knew from the start that you had to leave.” Even to herself she sounds cold, and he doesn’t respond, only clutches the statue in a manner that seems possessive. Instinctively she reaches out to take it from him, and instinctively he resists letting go of it. When he pulls the figure away from her, it slips from both their fingers.

Maggie has a vision of it crashing through the ceiling beneath them, tumbling to the floor far below, breaking into a hundred shards and a swarm of paper bills. George Ray reaches for it as it falls, loses his balance on the rafter, flails. Grabbing his arm to steady him, she’s dragged forward. They end up pressed together, frozen in place, one’s weight countering the other’s, arching over the empty space between the rafters.

He starts to laugh, at their good fortune perhaps, and the reverberations run through her. There’s nothing but his body to keep her from falling. Slowly, carefully, they ease their way back to their previous positions, her weight shifting from her toes to the balls of her feet again. When she’s standing safely once more, she looks down and sees the statue nestled into the pink foam insulation at his feet, perched comfortably above the void.

Brid’s still in bed the next day when Maggie rises, so she puts on her coat and rubber boots, thinking she’ll spend a bit of time with George Ray. As she steps into the backyard, she starts to imagine telling him about the money, but her thoughts are disrupted by the sound of a vehicle pulling into the drive. Going around the house to investigate, she sees a woman about her age exiting from the driver’s side of a cream-coloured car. She’s wearing a buckskin vest over her blouse and a paperboy cap atop long auburn hair. When Maggie calls out a hello, the woman returns the greeting and says she’s looking for someone named Maggie Dunne.

Maggie wonders if she can get away with replying that Miss Dunne lives three roads over. She confesses to being herself, though, and the woman’s face lights up.

“I hope this isn’t an imposition,” she says, “but I was hoping to talk with you about your father.”

Maggie’s throat has suddenly gone dry. “I’m not talking to reporters. If you want, my grandmother’s in Syracuse—”

“Yes, I’ve met your family there,” the woman replies. “Your uncle gave me your address.”

Maggie can’t hide her irritation. Uncle Morley wouldn’t have had any compunction about doing it, either. Probably he took great delight in selling her out.

“I’m not a reporter,” says the woman. “I make documentaries.”

A woman filmmaker. It seems strange, after all Maggie’s work with the camera, for someone to turn up who does it for a living.

“You’re making a movie about my father?”

“I wasn’t planning it,” the woman says. “I was in Laos shooting another film when I heard stories about how he died.” She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a business card. It’s still warm from her thigh when Maggie takes it.

“I have a TV segment on him airing in a few days,” the woman continues, “but I’d like to do something longer. When I heard he had a daughter living on a commune …” She breaks off and peers at Maggie with dark brown eyes so large and penetrating it’s like they’re cameras already recording her.

“You were in Laos,” says Maggie. Other than Wale, she’s never met anyone who has been there. For almost two months she’s been desperate for information about her father, and here’s someone who has been investigating him. The thought makes her both eager and circumspect. “So you know what happened,” she says.

“I know what people said. An opium deal that went bad. Your father caught up in it by accident.” The woman speaks in such a neutral tone that it’s impossible to tell what she believes herself.

“You think it was by accident?” Maggie asks.

The woman squints at her. “What do you think happened?”

When Maggie doesn’t answer, the woman looks toward the house as if hoping for an invitation to enter. “You knew him better than anyone. It’s why I wanted to speak with you.” Her tone offers intimacy and understanding, but it sets Maggie on edge.

“Are you working for the Church? Trying to prove there was a miracle? Or are you out to debunk all that?”

The woman considers her answer. “I suppose I’m interested in symbols.” Seeing Maggie’s bemusement, she adds, “Your father’s a symbol of the war for people now. For some he’s a symbol of faith.” She says these last words too earnestly for Maggie’s liking.

“He was my father,” says Maggie, feeling almost petulant.

“He was never a symbol for you?”

“Is that how you see your own father?”

The woman laughs good-naturedly. “Why, yes. When I was a girl, he was a symbol of the life I swore never to lead.”

“And what was that?” says Maggie, although she doesn’t care to know the answer.

“You can probably guess,” the woman replies, but Maggie doesn’t bother and the woman doesn’t say.