Robert McGill: Once We Had a Country

Her imagination playing tricks. It had to be. Because for a moment she could have sworn the figure at the bottom of the stairs was her father.

When she wakes up in the morning, Fletcher’s still asleep, so she dresses silently. Downstairs, Brid is already at work cleaning the kitchen cupboards, her sunglasses hiding her eyes and offering no reflection, only a depthless surface that eats the light. Pauline sits at the table drawing with crayons on a piece of cardboard.

“How did you sleep?” Maggie asks.

“It was ninety degrees and we were in a van,” says Brid. “You figure it out.”

“You didn’t come into the house last night?”

Brid shakes her head, apparently uninterested in why Maggie would pose such a question. Instead, she asks her if she’ll watch Pauline for a while. Brid says the kid’s driving her nuts. Pauline abandons her crayoning to observe them both with a stern expression, giving no indication of what she’s done to send her mother round the bend. The only thing out of place is a smear of something orange on her cheek, crayon or marmalade. Her curly-haired doll sits slumped beside her.

Maggie looks deep within herself and is unable to dredge up the least desire to babysit. The mere idea of it reminds her too much of the little grade two students she left behind in Boston, their clutching fingers and shrill demands, their expectation that she could make everything right for them simply because she was the adult in the room. But her bladder is full and she can’t be bothered inventing excuses.

“Pauline, why don’t you and I go outside?” she says, trying to sound keen. The girl doesn’t move.

“Go with Auntie Maggs before Mommy has a fit,” says Brid.

Pauline drops from her chair and crosses the room to take Maggie’s hand. Just before she does, she turns back and returns to the table for her doll. “Come along, Buddy!” she says reprovingly. “Before Mommy has a fit.”

Brid has said she named Pauline after her own father, a Harvard professor who, according to Brid, is a second-rate mathematician and a first-rate asshole, and who disowned Brid when Pauline came along. Maggie hasn’t yet found the right moment to ask Brid why she would name her daughter after such a person. Certainly Pauline isn’t an asshole, at least not yet. It’s true she seldom laughs and is prone to tantrums, but you can’t really say a three-year-old has a personality, can you? She’s only a little bundle of flesh and sensory impressions. The students in Maggie’s class were more than twice as old, yet this is how she tried to think of them, not wanting to take against them too much. What age must a child reach before you can start to dislike it legitimately? Nine? Ten? In high school, Maggie once babysat a ten-year-old boy who was definitely a first-rate asshole.

“Keep a close eye on her outside,” says Brid. “The orchard’s a minefield.”

“What do you mean?” asks Maggie.

“You’ll see.”

The air is wet and heavy as Maggie and Pauline cross the back lawn. In the dank outhouse Maggie sits, trying to imagine she’s alone, while Pauline waits on the other side of the door. Finally, Maggie gives up and the two of them make their way farther from the house, until they reach a low, flat building with small windows and a tin roof. The door’s locked, and the interior’s too dark to reveal itself through the glass. Past it, the cherry orchard begins, the trees looking stunted and unkempt.

On the horizon are low hills crested by radio towers, two of them close together, a third off to the right, either smaller or more distant, she isn’t sure. The land is more lushly vegetative than in Boston, and when the sun pushes through the leaves, Maggie feels something rise in her—not contentment, it’s too giddy and unsettling; more like a charge of possibility. It’s what she felt near the end of April at Fletcher’s place, that night he first described the farm to her after checking it out. Finally, she realized, she had a proper reason not to join her father in Laos as he wanted. Ever since Christmas he’d been needling her about her complacency, asking her why she didn’t want to see the world and make a difference to people’s lives. Now she could tell him she was going to do just that, only with Fletcher instead of him.

As they enter the rows of trees, there’s the sound of an engine firing up. When she turns to identify the source, for the first time she notices the fence of corrugated metal eight feet high that runs along one side of the orchard. Piled behind it are the bodies of crushed cars. Somehow, Fletcher forgot to mention that the farm is next to a wrecking yard. A bit farther on, Maggie sees what Brid meant about keeping a close eye: the ground beneath the trees is strewn with automobile parts. There are rear-view mirrors, hubcaps, and tumbleweeds of electrical wire. What force of wind could have carried them here? Maggie begins to pick up the detritus, gathering it into a pile, and Pauline joins her, pleased by the impromptu treasure hunt. Once they have accumulated a small heap, Maggie realizes she wants to film it in the same way she filmed the bedroom.

“Let’s go back to the house,” she announces. “I have a game we can play.”

Pauline deigns to take her hand again, and they head off in the direction they came. When they arrive at the bedroom upstairs, Maggie removes the camera from its bag.

“It makes pictures,” she explains. “You know, like with television?”

Pauline looks doubtful and reaches to take the device from her, but Maggie lifts it away. “No, not a toy. Only grown-ups can use it. You know what, though? We’ll make pictures of you. I’ll be the director and you can be the movie star. Would you like that?”

Pauline seems unsure. When Maggie points the camera at her to demonstrate what she means, the girl hides her face with her hands.

“Later we can show the film to Mommy. Won’t that be fun?” Pauline peeks out from between her fingers. “Here’s what I’ll say,” Maggie tells her. “ Lights … camera … action.”

At the beginning the screen is dark. Then two title cards appear in sequence, crayoned letters on buff cardboard.

The second card is pulled back to reveal the living room with the peace sign on the wall. Pauline starts to enter the frame but is restrained by Maggie’s free hand, which proceeds to move aside an armchair even while she continues to film. On the floor behind the chair is a mound of chewed-up foam. A close-up of the couch shows cigarette burns on the upholstery.

The dining room is next, empty save for a few lawn chairs and a plank lying flat across two sawhorses. Then there’s the bathroom with its wallpaper coming off in strips. Pauline steps toward the toilet, lifts the lid, and pulls a face. After that the film cuts to the exterior and shots of car parts in the orchard, followed by one of the outhouse. Its door opens and Pauline emerges holding her nose, pretending to cry. In the left side of the frame a small snake flashes emerald and disappears into the grass.

Another shot studies the low building on the orchard’s edge. The camera advances and Pauline runs ahead to the door. Inside is a long room with a lone bare bulb dangling from a cord. Fletcher lies on a bench in the corner with his shirt off. His face is red and puffing, and he arches his back as he pumps a bar across his chest. When he sees the camera, he sets down the bar and gestures with delight to a set of dumbbells on the floor nearby, showing off what he has found. In the next shot he’s helping Pauline to lift a dumbbell high above her head.