A Year of Lesser Read online

  While Johnny listens he looks at the cloth-covered buttons on Charlene’s dress. They have Xs stitched into their centres. Charlene keeps talking. “Everything’s a joke, isn’t it? This morning, up in the tree? I think about you and I wonder, How many more times is he going to be saved? The girls at the bank? Well, they talk sometimes and they kid around asking if you’re still a Christian. I play along because what else can I do? So, my husband’s a joke. And then you go and climb that tree like a little monkey and I don’t know who you are any more. Oh shit, I’m late.” She plucks Kleenex from a box, dabs at her nose, punches her arms into her spring coat, says “I’m late” once more, and walks out of the house, leaving Johnny at the table, spinning an empty coffee mug in his hands. He listens to Charlene’s Mustang start up and then she’s gone, down the driveway and out onto the mile road turning right, towards town.

  Almost a year ago, the day Johnny’s father killed himself, Johnny was with Loraine Wallace. They’d talked meat-meal and feed additives out in the yard, the wind blowing leaves around their feet, and then they’d gone in for coffee and sat at the kitchen table that looked out onto the grass and the machine shed. Johnny hadn’t visited for a while and Loraine was being shy but soon Johnny was talking nonsense from the back of his throat and Loraine was letting him.

  “Missed you, Loraine,” he said.

  “Not me,” she answered. “The sex.”

  “No, no, you. This kitchen here, the way you push through life, your knuckles there.” He took her hands and touched her knuckles, one at a time.

  “You know, sometimes, Johnny, I think I should get a different feed salesman. I wait for you and wait for you and you don’t come and I have to phone in my order and then the next moment you’re here and I don’t want to let you go.” Loraine came around the table and held Johnny’s head. She was a small woman. Johnny liked her tiny nose, her little ears, the size of her bum in his hands. Her arms were muscled from heavy work, her tummy flat. When he undressed her and ran his hands around on her body he thought of her as a young boy who happened to grow breasts. She wore an invisible wreath of oats and Palmolive and the faintest scent of ammonia.

  When they were finished touching each other all over and Loraine had bitten into his chest, they lay on her bed and she traced his face and said, “I love your mouth. It’s so big. Ugly sometimes. I think of your mouth when you’re not here and I wonder what it’s doing, the food that’s in it, who it’s talking to, who it’s with. Your voice too. When I first heard your voice on the phone, the time you called about that bad mix, I was surprised because your voice was different, as if disguised, and I didn’t recognize you. But then, I just had to think about your lips, your gums, your teeth, your tongue, the way the left side lifts in a kind of happy sneer, and I realized, yeah, that’s him.” She kissed his ear. “I have to go clean out the barns.”

  Johnny rolled onto his side. Put a hand on her waist. “Let’s just say, you and me, we were together. Okay? Would you want children?”

  She nosed his chin. “Sure, anything.”

  “No, really. You’ve got a thirteen-year-old. Would you start again?”

  Loraine pulled back, her small blue eyes skipping over Johnny’s body, then resting on his face. “What are you saying, you’d leave Charlene?”

  “I’m not saying that, I’m just wondering what you think.”

  “Don’t play with my head.” She pushed him away and sat on the edge of the bed, pulling on a T-shirt, socks, panties, jeans. Her hair bounced as she moved. Johnny watched her shoulder blades, her ribs shine through her back.

  He asked, “Do you eat?”

  “Yeah, eggs.” She left him there to get dressed on his own.

  When he walked out into the yard she came out of the barn and met him by his half-ton. Johnny watched her come, her black boots up to her knees, her thin face flattened by the light, and he wondered why he kept hurting people, what there was about him that made him want to see people in pain. Sometimes it worked to will a good feeling, a love for someone, and he tried that now. He lit a cigarette, put an arm around Loraine and squeezed.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  “You’ll come again soon. Okay? It gets lonely out here by myself.”

  “Sure, soon.”

  “And you know, Johnny?” Loraine pushed in and gripped one of his legs between hers; hot on his thigh. “I could have a baby, really.” Her eyes were watery from the wind. She tried to kiss him again. He let her and then put his chin on her head and watched the swallows spin over her barn. He didn’t say anything, he just let her hold him.

  “Go now,” she said finally, pushing him towards his truck.

  After leaving Loraine’s, Johnny drove a mile south and turned into his father’s farmyard. Johnny’s mother had died a year earlier and his father lived alone. Turning off the engine he sensed immediately something was wrong. Jack wasn’t barking and that was unusual. He watched the house, the barn, the shed, and the yard, looking for movement. He climbed out of the car, leaned on the door and listened. The wind was knocking leaves off the trees. The shed door was off its latch and banging. He found the black Lab dead alongside the west side of the house. Its head was crushed as if it had been hit with a heavy pipe. Nearby he found a baseball bat with Jack’s hair on it. Blood too.

  He found his father hanging from the branch on the big elm, the branch that stretched out parallel to the ground, twelve feet up. His father was in socks, his shoes lay on the ground below him; Johnny imagined they fell off in the act of death. He didn’t look at his father’s face. He went into the house and phoned Ike at OK Feeds and then he sat down in the rocker in the middle of the big room and waited. He heard Ike come in and talk to him and ask him if he was okay. Then Ike made some phone calls and took Johnny into town and Charlene was located. Johnny learned later that a grain truck was used to cut his father down. They drove the truck right under his feet and someone, Leonard Ostnick, he thinks, stood on the cab and cut him down.

  He knows when he’s backsliding. It’s happened so many times before he sees the signals before they’re there. Except this time he doesn’t care as much. The sense of failure isn’t quite as acute. After Charlene’s Mustang has left that morning, Johnny calls OK Feeds and says he’s sick. Then he sits at the kitchen table and pours himself Five Star, one glass after another, and he watches the clock on the wall. He falls asleep, head on the table, and wakes late in the afternoon, his temples aching, his hands light. He shaves sloppily and then leaves the house and drives to his sister Carol’s place in town.

  Carol has a three-year-old girl and she’s also eight months pregnant. She stands, her ankles thick, and tells Johnny that he can stay for supper. Her voice is defensive, impatient. Johnny considers saying, I’m clean, but he decides against it, knowing he must smell of alcohol. He finds Erica in the living room and he lies on the rug beside her and pretends to bite her leg. “Alligator,” he growls. Erica squeals and jumps away. She runs back at Johnny and lands on his head. She’s wearing shorts and her bare legs are soft and cool. Johnny likes the feel of them on his neck and face. He tickles her till she calls out, panicky and breathless. Carol comes into the living room and suggests they read a book. “I hate to see her get all wound up just before supper. Roy does the same thing.”

  So Johnny reads a book to Erica and from where he sits he catches glimpses of Carol in the kitchen, straining spaghetti, opening a tin of corn, and he thinks how she’s changed. She used to like him, a lot, but lately she’s more aloof, as if she doesn’t trust him any more. He leaves his niece with a lift-the-flap book, goes into the kitchen and leans on the counter. Carol’s face is flushed and the windows along the far wall are steamed up. She lifts down three plates from the cabinet and as her arms go up so does her top and Johnny sees perfectly how her stomach looks. Her belly button has popped out into a tiny elephant’s trunk. There are narrow red pencil marks creasing her belly. Her top is thin and Johnny can see that he
r breasts and nipples are bigger. She’s wearing big sweatpants, her hips are wide.

  “Roy’s going to be late, he’s got a meeting.”

  Johnny gestures at her stomach. “You gonna have more?”

  Carol stops, supports her stomach with her hands and says, “This is not a good time to ask. I remember with Erica, right after she was born I wanted six more like her. But now, I just want to get rid of this bundle.” She dips a spoon into the sauce and lifts it to her mouth. She looks at Johnny and says, “How long you here for?”

  Johnny shrugs. “Oh, I don’t know. A few nights? I won’t bother you, sleep in the basement, eat at Chuck’s. It’s just Charlene and me, we need a break.”

  “You’re going to lose her.” Carol says this softly, as if talking about the spaghetti in the colander, but her meaning is there.

  He sleeps on the floor in the basement, wrapped in a thin sleeping bag. Before turning out the light he hears Carol on the phone with Charlene. First they’re discussing him and then they’re not, and Johnny falls asleep wondering how long it’ll take before Charlene misses him or he misses her. He thinks about her walking around alone in the big house, touching walls and light switches with her thick fingers, locking the doors, wishing for the dog Johnny doesn’t want, and then climbing the stairs to crawl into the bed, keeping to her side, her hair spread black across the white pillow.

  He calls in sick again Friday morning, has breakfast at Chuck’s, then goes home for clean clothes. Charlene has left for work. The bed is unmade, dishes lie unrinsed in the sink, a couple of books are spread and lie cover up on the rug beside the bed. There is a sense of haste or anger in the way the house is topsy-turvy. Johnny guesses that Charlene is upset and he’s glad for this. He hates indifference. He listens to an oldie-goldie station while he bathes and dresses. He thinks about Loraine and how when she touches him it’s like the Holy Spirit tickling his spine. He packs an overnight bag and in the early afternoon he drives to her farm and finds her counting eggs in the barn. She’s wearing coveralls and an Expos cap.

  She looks up at him standing in the low doorway and she doesn’t look surprised. “Go put on the kettle,” she says. “I’ll be there.”

  When she comes into the house she’s changed into jeans and a black sweater that buttons up the back. She takes off her shoes at the door; she’s not wearing socks. She stands on tiptoes and washes her hands at the sink and Johnny sees the bottoms of her bare feet, the insteps like two milky stains. They don’t talk for a while, just sit across from each other and clink spoons against saucers. Finally Loraine says, “News has it you’re saved.”

  Johnny pulls at an earlobe and tilts his head. “I guess.” He sighs, lights a cigarette and offers Loraine one. Sometimes she smokes, today she takes one. The cigarette sits deep in the crotch of her fingers, unlit until she takes Johnny’s hand and guides a match close to her mouth. Her eyes blink and her lips wet the filter and she says, “Thank you.” Johnny finds her smallness exhilarating. So tight. She smokes half the cigarette and then puts it out. “Makes me dizzy,” she says. Johnny watches her fingers move and thinks she wants to touch his hands. “I sure wish I could be saved sometime,” she says.

  Johnny searches her face for mockery but knows he won’t find it. Loraine doesn’t have Charlene’s cynicism. He snorts, “What do you mean?”

  “Exactly that.”

  “Aw, you don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s silliness, really. It’s for fools like me who think maybe if they can talk in tongues, they’ll be a better person.”

  Loraine keeps pressing. “And each time you do this you release a few sins, I guess?” This evokes for Johnny the image of a child freeing helium balloons into the sky. He smiles but does not answer. He does not really like to talk about his own salvation, because unless he is in the throes of redemption the entire act seems ridiculous, made up, a poorly told tale.

  “I believe in sin,” Loraine says, and her face is so bright and cheery that Johnny lets her go on. “Sin is spending your whole life worrying about it.” Her nose moves up and her nostrils become black holes.

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “I saw Charlene this morning. She said hello to me and then I paid my bills and she gave me the three twenties I asked for. We talked about her reading club. She said I should come. I said that sounded nice. Mostly women. Why is it, do you think, that men don’t like that kind of thing?”

  Johnny has this sense of things not being right. Loraine is too happy, too much in control. Normally by now they’d be holding each other or he’d have said, Do you want to? and they’d have laughed and done it. He’s breathing through his mouth and watching Loraine’s knees, her chin, throat, thighs, hands. White hands, like those perfect eggs she gathers.

  Loraine says, “Charlene said you’d left. It was strange her telling me that, sometimes I wonder if she knows about you and me, and for a bit there I felt close to her like we could be friends. I said I hadn’t seen you, I mean selling feed, and now here you are.”

  “I haven’t left her.” Johnny takes Loraine’s hand. He likes her gullibility. She’s like him in a way, great intentions but a weak eye for completion. It’s the things of the flesh that throw them off and that’s why they’d make a poor couple. But that doesn’t stop Johnny now. He talks about Chris, Loraine’s son, about seeing him at the drop-in centre where they talked about skating, about boards and half-pipes.

  “That’s so good,” Loraine says. She breathes quicker when talking about Chris. She holds Johnny’s fingers and they talk about drugs and girls. Her boy is fascinated by both, she says. Johnny promises to help Chris. “The boy’s good, he’s smart.” Then Loraine has her hands on Johnny’s head and neck and then they’re down his shirt and she’s whispering, “Jesus, Johnny, Jesus, you’ve got me way down deep.”

  After, when Johnny is playing with her hands, her beautiful hands, Loraine says, “Who are you?” He feels her breath on his cheek and he doesn’t answer, he just keeps touching her hands. They are soft considering the heavy work she does. But she wears gloves all the time and in the evenings she pours lotion on her palms and she smooths the lotion around over her knuckles and up her wrists. Then she works carefully at her fingernails with tiny tools and she paints her nails. She paints them the colour of her hands, like the inside of a large seashell, so Johnny, when he holds them close like he’s doing now, has a hard time seeing her nails. He takes one of her hands and holds it over his nipple and she pinches him lightly while he thinks about her question.

  Johnny doesn’t like questions like this. It reminds him of exams and impossible expectations and gnawing on pens. Stupid questions about people long dead, about history. Questions that have nothing to do with those small breasts there that a few minutes before he took into his mouth. “Here,” he had said and filled his mouth with one and then the other and measured them with his tongue. Then he smelled them and he was reminded of when he was a boy and he sucked on his arm and laid his nose on the wet spot that was left.

  Charlene told him once, You have no sense of yourself other than what you need. That may be true, Johnny thought, but not so bad. And now, listening to Loraine breathe, watching her breasts rise, then fall, rise again, knowing she is waiting for an answer, he says, “I’ve known joy. Not all the time and maybe never for very long, but I’ve known joy.”

  The drop-in centre remains closed Friday and Saturday. Johnny doesn’t show up. After Loraine tells him he can’t spend the night because of Chris, he drives out to St. Adolphe where he sits in the bar and drinks shooters with guys he knows and some he doesn’t. There are a few women present too, women around forty with soft stomachs and last names like Rochelle and Laperriere. There’s one younger woman who reminds Johnny of Loraine; she’s thin-mouthed and skinny and wears jeans. Johnny knows a guy from St. Adolphe, Ronald Lavallee, and he spends Friday night at Ronald’s house. He finds himself back in the bar on Saturday afternoon trying to talk to the girl in jeans.

/>   “Who are you?” Johnny asks.

  “The waitress.”

  “What’s your name?” Johnny presses, but the girl ignores him.

  Johnny loads himself up and by early evening he is in his half-ton and driving. He tries to remember where he’s going but he can’t. The road is empty and Johnny figures he’s driving slowly down the middle. The trees pass him and he misses the turn to Lesser. Then a curve appears and the Rat River bridge and he feels a jolt as he rubs the guard rail and rolls to a stop on the edge of the grassy embankment. He puts the half-ton in park and falls asleep.

  Two fishermen wake Johnny Sunday morning. They are wearing green hats and checked jackets and they’re standing outside his truck saying, “Lucky,” and “Yeah, one lucky fellow,” and then one guy pokes his head in the door and asks, “You okay?”

  “Sure, sure.”

  “You’re lucky.”

  Johnny doesn’t answer. After the men have slid down the slope to the river and walked up to the point, Johnny climbs out of the truck and looks at a big hole in the guard rail. “Quite a blow,” he mumbles. He stares down at the river which has slowed now in fall and then he looks at the trees and he figures they’re poplars but he’s never been terribly sure about trees. He sits on the ground with his back up against the wheel of his truck and he watches the men in green jackets still-fishing by the point. His stomach hurts. He has a bruise on his cheek where he hit the steering wheel. His hands shake.

  He goes to church that morning. First he drives home to see Charlene but she’s not there. The same dirty dishes are still in the sink and this surprises him. He showers and drives to town. He goes to the Mennonite Brethren church, the one he attended as a child. It’s a big brick building with a blue rug on the main floor and oak pews with blue cushions. Johnny sits near the back. He hears the songs, the organ, the voices all around him but he doesn’t really listen. At one point he considers standing and relating his own personal experience but there is something about the woman in front of him, perhaps the angle of her neck, that stops him. He lifts his eyes once during a prayer and studies the vaulted ceiling. Between the varnished rafters, at their base, run narrow rectangular windows that reveal the blue sky. There are pigeons roosting outside those windows. Johnny watches the pigeons and then the sun flows through the windows and strikes the far wall just above the heads of the people praying. They stop praying and begin to sing. The sunlight reminds Johnny of warm hands, all one colour, and of how, eyes watering in the wind, Loraine squeezed his leg and said long ago, “And you know, Johnny, I could, really.” There is a goodness in people, he thinks, that is remarkable.