Robert McGill - Once We Had a Country

Maggie tries to transmit some sort of empathy through her eyes, but Brid appears uncomfortable being looked at in such a manner.

“Sweetie, what are we going to do here?” she says. “You can’t just wait all winter for George Ray to come back. Is it a Catholic thing, this devotion to misery?”

Maggie frowns and turns away.

“Say something, would you?” implores Brid. “God, you drive me crazy, the way you just sit there.”

Maggie can’t help herself. “I drive you crazy? The things you say to me—”

“I only say them so you’ll respond.” Brid flops onto her back, then lies there with her chest rising and falling for so long Maggie wonders if she’s gone to sleep. “There were nights,” says Brid, breaking the illusion, “awful nights, the last couple of months, when I thought about calling you. A few times I almost did.”

“You should have,” says Maggie. She reaches down to push Brid’s hair out of her eyes, but Brid seems not to notice.

“No, that kind of phone call is like heroin. Do it once and you can’t stop. Soon nobody answers and you don’t have any friends left to call.” Her gaze starts on a wandering path around the room. “Weird being back without Pauline. In the summer I was terrified she’d drown in the creek. At first she cried for hours in that camper van, but I wouldn’t let her into the house because of the gas, remember? She thinks my name is Bread. Isn’t that funny?”

Maggie wants to be supportive, to leave behind her own petty self and enter Brid’s sadness with her, but she can’t quite do it. Reeling through her is the thought that Fletcher thinks she got rid of their child. She needs to be alone to deal with it. Looking toward the door, she hopes for George Ray to appear, to save her and Brid from whatever is about to come.

“Don’t worry,” says Brid. “I’m not going to freak out.”

“I wasn’t thinking that.”

“You were. You’re wondering where George Ray is.” She seems more resigned than offended. “I wish I could keep it inside like you, with the surface all shiny and perfect, but I can’t. I’m like that wall.”

She gestures to the claw marks where Fletcher threw the reels. Maggie has always thought of the wall as purely white, but as she studies it now, imperfections reveal themselves: stains and cracks, and a long vertical line where a joist behind the drywall has swollen. She wonders why Brid, who knows her so well in certain respects, who sometimes appears to read her thoughts, should fail to recognize how Maggie might be a bit like that wall too.

That night, Brid beats her fists against her mattress. The world is a rotten place. She wants to kill herself, and she says it’s because she watched that goddamned film. Maggie sits at her bedside and responds to every twitch and moan with a hand on her back. After a time Brid calls for Elliot. When he appears, she squeezes him until he struggles away and hops off the bed. Brid reaches after him and gives a hitched sob.

It’s close to midnight before Maggie slides into her own bed next to George Ray. They fall into exhausted, muffled sex. A month ago she imagined that making love in these final days would gain an added tenderness, but she’s so tired that it feels as though the two of them are strangers.

That night, she dreams she’s her father. Or rather, she’s in her father’s person, lost in the jungle with Yia Pao’s son, following the same muddy goat track she has imagined in waking life. Holding the child makes balancing treacherous. Then it comes to her that the baby isn’t Yia Pao’s; it’s hers. Her father took the child to Laos, and now it’s in her arms. She looks for chances to leave the trail and save them both, knowing what lies ahead, but her legs are compelled along the path. She starts watching for tripwires while the baby wriggles in her arms, growing smaller until it’s no bigger than a mouse and scampers from her grasp.

The telephone wakes her, ringing and ringing with nobody to answer it. George Ray is no longer in the bed beside her. Even though she takes her time going downstairs, her mind still half tethered to the world of the dream, the ringing doesn’t stop, so that when she picks up the phone, she’s thinking there must be some technical malfunction. After she says hello, a woman speaks to her in George Ray’s accent.

“Is this Miss Dunne? Miss Dunne, my name is Velma Ransom. I’m sorry for disturbing you. Please, may I talk to George Ray?”

The voice is calm and civil, knowing no grievance, feeling no betrayal.

“Yes, of course. Wait, I’ll find him.” Putting down the receiver, she leaves the house and meets George Ray halfway across the lawn. There’s a pair of buckets in his hands. “It’s your wife. On the phone. She sounds so lovely!”

He frowns, sets down the buckets, and hurries past her toward the house. From the mud room door she hears him talking angrily, almost shouting, louder than she’s ever heard him speak, in sentences she doesn’t understand.

“George Ray,” she says from the doorway, not daring to enter the room, and he looks up as if mystified by her presence.

“What is it?” There’s no affection in his voice.

“Call back.”

“Why?” He seems bewildered by the idea.

“It’s expensive for her to phone here. Hang up and call her back.”

“Expensive. Yes,” he says, quieter now. “Thank you. That’s just what I was telling her.” He seems to say it partly for Maggie’s sake, partly for the woman at the other end of the line. Then he tells his wife he’ll ring her back in a moment. Once he has set down the phone, he calls Maggie’s name, but by that time she’s upstairs and doesn’t answer. Let him come and find her if he wants. She waits and waits, willing his arrival so hard she gets a headache, so hard it’s a surprise when an hour has passed and still he isn’t there.

Twenty-four hours before George Ray is due to depart, he enters the kitchen to tell them there’s more graffiti on the wall. This time it says YANKEES GO HOME . Hearing this, Maggie just laughs; the message seems safely impersonal, clichéd. Brid is less sanguine. She vows to resume her nighttime patrols, and she only grows more adamant when Maggie says she doesn’t want her in the orchard on her own. Then, after lunch, George Ray tells Maggie he’s going to spend the afternoon working. There are saplings that need attention if they’re to survive the winter, and he wants to earn his final day’s wages honestly. When Maggie suggests working alongside him, he points out that someone has to mind Brid, and reluctantly she agrees, so Brid and Maggie stay indoors playing cards. At one point Brid asks why they can’t just spend the afternoon helping him, and Maggie finds herself replying that he prefers to be on his own. It strikes her as a lie and the truth at the same time.

At least he comes in for dinner. Then it’s Brid who’s reluctant to join them, saying she doesn’t want to get in the way of their final supper together. She has to be cajoled into sitting down. Even after she does, it’s a miserable meal, with Brid poking at her lasagna and George Ray idly swirling the wine in his glass.

“Don’t drink this stuff in Newcross,” he says. “Could be the last till next summer.” He downs it in one long swallow. After dinner he insists on washing the dishes and Brid grabs the towel to dry, so Maggie’s left at the table blowing ripples across the surface of her tea.

“Hey!” cries Brid angrily as Maggie’s in the middle of a sip. At first she thinks it’s something she’s done; then she sees Brid running into the mud room. “There’s somebody out there. Hey!” In her bare feet and nightie, Brid charges into the yard.