A Year of Lesser Read online

  EGGS, NEW-LAID

  Loraine calls Johnny at work on a Friday afternoon to tell him the news but he’s not in and she won’t give the secretary a message. She doesn’t say who’s speaking, just hangs up. She phones his house later that evening but Charlene answers and so Loraine has to make small talk; the book club, the bonspiel, work, farming. Just before Loraine hangs up, she says, “Oh, Johnny wouldn’t be there, would he? It’s about some feed mix.”

  Charlene’s voice is cheery and ignorant. “No,” she says, “He’s at the centre.”

  Loraine sits by the phone, pushes a pencil around on a paper, and considers calling the centre. She hesitates because her son Chris might be there and she dislikes giving the impression of meddling in his life. The dog is scratching at the back door so Loraine lets him in. She holds the door open a while and pokes her head out and looks up and breathes the air. She can hear a car passing by on the mile road over by the Loepky farm. It’s a cool October night, close to Halloween, and there’s a smell of smoke; some farmers are burning stubble.

  The generator over by the second barn is faltering; it’s been like that for a few months. Loraine figures it’ll just go one of these cold nights and then the emergency generator will have to cut in and if it doesn’t, she’ll have ten thousand dead chickens. Chickens are stupid. She closes the door, rubs her bare arms, and considers that if people were locked in cages, in groups of three and four, they’d be stupid too, or deviants, or homosexuals. She wanders back to the phone and picks it up. She can smell herself on the receiver. She likes that. She curls up in an armchair, folds her small legs under her, and punches at the numbers.

  A kid answers. Loraine can hear music in the background. She would like to ask this kid about Chris. Is he there? But instead she says, “I want to talk to Johnny Fehr.”

  And then, after a few minutes, she hears his voice and for a moment she can’t speak. She’s been aching to tell him, walking around sucking on this secret for several weeks and now, at this point, she wants the giddiness of telling.

  “Johnny?” she says, “It’s me.”

  He seems neither pleased nor concerned. Loraine tries to imagine him, the way he looks standing by the phone. He’ll be wearing jeans and she likes that. She knows he’s smoking, she can hear him draw, even though he’s got a no-smoking rule for the centre.

  “We have to talk,” she says. She lifts her eyebrows and says, “Is tomorrow okay?”

  Johnny hums. The phone crackles as he shifts and stubs his cigarette. “What’s wrong?” he asks.

  Loraine’s mouth is dry. This was supposed to be fun, she thinks. “Nothing,” she says, “I got some news.”

  Johnny’s thinking. Loraine can tell. And then he says, “Listen, I’m going up to Sprague tomorrow, talk to a customer. You wanna come? For the morning?”

  “Yes,” Loraine says, too quickly perhaps. She’s holding herself, one palm on her stomach, and she’s remembering the way Johnny looks when he stands by the window and puts on his shirt. He rarely tucks in his tails and a couple of buttons are missed and this could be sloppiness to some people but to Loraine it’s what and who Johnny Fehr is and she loves him. “Yes,” she says again.

  Johnny is leasing a Ninety-eight Olds. It’s dark green and serious. Saturday morning Loraine sits in the front seat, runs her hand over the upholstery, and thinks that she prefers the half-ton. It has a smell of oil and grain and she likes the way Johnny looks behind the wheel. This new car makes him look too earnest.

  They’re mostly quiet driving down the Number 52 through Steinbach, but when they turn onto the Number 12 and it begins to snow, tiny flakes melting on the windshield, Loraine talks about an aunt who lives in Grunthal. “She’s got twelve kids,” she says. “They live in a three-bedroom house and the husband’s a mechanic.”

  Johnny doesn’t answer. He’s playing with the radio. “I love this,” he says. “They’re a family, I think. The Rankins. I saw them once on TV and they all look beautiful.” He lights a cigarette and offers Loraine one. She shakes her head and Johnny looks at her, surprised.

  “Anyway,” Loraine says, “this aunt wanted all those children, just wanted them. Two died in a car accident. She still has ten. It’s hard to imagine.” Loraine knows Johnny is waiting for her to talk, to say what she has to say, but she’s thinking now that something’s wrong, that when she finally really talks he won’t listen.

  She says, “I gather eggs. Twice a day. I take six at a time. Three in each hand. It’s strange these days to handle eggs. Not that they’re fertilized in any way but still it’s odd. I used to candle eggs at the hatchery. Watch them as they ran over a scanner, look for flaws, blood spots, bubbles of air. Sometimes I could see right into them, like I was looking into a perfect glass stone.” She pauses, reaches out, and takes Johnny’s right hand off the wheel and presses his palm against her stomach. “Here,” she whispers.

  Johnny’s tongue is touching his top lip and his eyes wrinkle. He’s taking her words and running them around in his head. Finally, he bangs a palm against the steering wheel. “Aw, no, Loraine, really?” A noise rises from his chest. Loraine cannot tell if this is joy or sorrow. But he turns and he smiles and “Yes,” he says.

  “You’re happy then?” Loraine asks. “Really?”

  And Johnny is, she can see that. Even later, after talking about it for a while, he hits at his leg. His excitement affects Loraine. Her fingers shake. She remembers this one time as a teenager, sitting on the rocks at Winnipeg Beach. She was wearing a bathing suit and talking to some boy she’d met two days earlier. She could sense the heat escaping from the boy’s skin and her bum felt the roughness of the rock. Her buttocks feel now as if they’ve been scraped along rock.

  Johnny’s quiet for a bit and then near Sprague he says, “Jesus, Loraine, the thought of you is killing me.” He looks at her on the other side of the car and clicks his tongue against his teeth. Loraine dips her chin and slides over and lays her head on Johnny’s lap. He’s wearing suit pants and they’re cool on Loraine’s cheek. She slides a hand deep into his cowboy boots and pulls at the hair on his calf. She wants to crawl inside him. “Hey, Johnny,” she whispers.

  “Hey,” he says back. He pulls the car over onto a side road. He lifts Loraine’s head and says, “Who’d have thought, you and me, huh?” And he takes her in his big hands and turns her small body, lays a nose on her flat stomach, gurgles and says, “Oh, my.”

  And as for Loraine, well, she’d let him do anything. She and Johnny have been lovers off and on for years now. He comes to her when he’s lonely, or tired of his wife Charlene, and Loraine lets him because she likes his hardness, the way his jaw moves, his crooked mouth. Now, in the front seat of the Olds, she clings to him and won’t let him go. “My little fucking monkey,” he says. She chatters in his ear and sucks on his neck. “Yes,” she says.

  Johnny doesn’t go to his appointment. Instead they cross into the States and drive the country roads, Loraine deep under Johnny’s arm, and then they head back up to Steinbach for lunch.

  Loraine watches Johnny eat. He likes to put things in his mouth; she is just one of those things. She says, “I’m worried about Chris. He’s tough these days, doesn’t talk.”

  Johnny’s elation has worn off. He’s stirring sugar into his coffee and staring out the large front window towards Main Street. “Chris’s been hanging out with this Krahn girl,” he says. “Melody’s her name.”

  Loraine is surprised and hurt. It’s unfair, Johnny knowing this. She wonders what this Melody looks like. She knows the parents but can’t picture the daughter.

  “Do you like Chris?” she asks.

  “Sure,” Johnny says. “Yeah.” Then, “I was thinking. About us and what we’re going to do. Leaving Charlene would kill her.”

  “Would it?”

  Johnny is scratching at a match. It finally lights. He is looking over Loraine’s head, at something only he can see. He refocuses, seeks out Loraine. “Yes, it would,” he says.<
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  Johnny pays for lunch and, out on the curb before climbing into the car, he pulls Loraine close and pushes his nose against her hair.

  Loraine doesn’t really like the town of Lesser. Most of the time she tries to stay away. She does her shopping at Super Valu in Winnipeg, except when she runs out of butter or milk and then she drives into Lesser and stops at the Solo store. Loraine finds she doesn’t fit in the town. She’s the wife of a dead farmer and it’s still strange for women to run their own farms. She can’t hobnob with the boys at Chuck’s; she has no desire to. Lesser’s an ugly little place with a sickness at its core; it’s full of death and gossip and churches. This is what Loraine thinks. It’s made a man like Johnny go all to pieces. He doesn’t know any more who he is. He wants to be a Christian and a do-gooder but he keeps falling and people laugh at him; they want him to fail. And when he does fail he comes running to Loraine.

  She remembers the day Johnny’s father committed suicide. It was eight o’clock in the evening and she was in the refrigerator room, stacking flats. She’d seen Johnny earlier that day. He’d come by and they’d made love in the bedroom and the sunlight had fallen through the thin curtain onto his arms and stomach, and later, counting eggs, his scent was still in her nose.

  Johnny had entered the refrigerator room and stood, leaning against the door, and told her about his father hanging from the tree and how he had no shoes, they must have been kicked off, and he told her about the dead dog and the bloody baseball bat. “Why on earth would he kill the dog?” Johnny asked.

  Loraine didn’t have too much to say. She kept stacking trays and glancing up at Johnny. She didn’t want to touch him right then, either. “Sorry, Johnny,” she said once, but he didn’t seem to hear. She wasn’t terribly sorry, she’d never really liked Mr. Fehr. He’d been stingy.

  “How’s Charlene managing all this?” Loraine asked. “Where is she?”

  “At home. I miss you,” Johnny said. “You.”

  Loraine shook her head. “No you don’t, Johnny. You use me. I’m sorry about your father,” she said, “but there’s nothing I can do. You and me, we’re apart. If you lay in my bed every night and I could hold you, not just have sex with you, then we could weep together, but what we have is nothing. We screw. That’s all.” Loraine was surprised at her own anger and at the word she’d just used. She hated it; so cold. She imagined that it was because her desire for Johnny had been spent that afternoon. Always, after the fact, she became rueful and disliked herself.

  Johnny hung his head. Loraine picked up an egg and heaved it at him. It hit the plywood wall beside him. He looked up and grinned. Furious, she threw two more eggs. One hit the floor, the other he caught and cradled in his palm. “Hickety pickety, my black hen,” he said. He put the captured egg in his jacket pocket and walked out. He left the door open. The chickens flapped and screamed in their cages. Loraine sat for the longest time, wishing Johnny would come back.

  Loraine goes to parent-teacher interviews at Lesser Collegiate and she talks to Mr. Jameson, the Grade Nine Science teacher, and Ms. Holt, the English teacher. Science is okay, Chris could do better she is told, but he’s all right. Outside the English class she waits for her interview and looks over Chris’s writing folder and journal. She wonders if Chris knows his writing is available for her to see.

  She reads, “Gonna write a cheap story about this woman who lives on a farm with her son. She’s a wannabe and so is he.” Loraine looks for the story but there is nothing else. Scribbled on the inside of the folder is this:

  Sex is like math.

  Subtract the clothing

  divide the legs

  and multiply.

  Inside the pocket is a paper with Chris’s sprawling handwriting:

  Your father was a bastard,

  Your mother was a whore,

  This all wouldn’t have happened

  If the rubber hadn’t tore!

  Loraine blinks, reads it again, and then she slides the paper back into the pocket and closes the folder. Ms. Holt pokes her head out and smiles, her face round, her eyes oily. Chris claims she’s a fossil and Loraine can see what he means. She knows that Ms. Holt taught Johnny. Taught him how to write a composition. She thinks she should ask about Johnny. Find out what kind of a student he had been, if back then already he was into sex. Of course.

  They sit at a table and Loraine says, “It’s so odd to be in a school. I keep waiting to be tested or something.” She tries to laugh but it comes out too loud and she turns her head, stares at the wall.

  But Ms. Holt is smiling and the two of them talk about living in this town, something Ms. Holt doesn’t do. She commutes from Winnipeg. “Oh, no,” she says, “it’d be claustrophobic.”

  Loraine nods. She leans forward and says, “The kids, when they write their compositions, do they have preoccupations? You know …”

  “Oh, yes, at this age everything ‘sucks’, of course. Our themes are violence and sex but we’re not allowed to write about either. When doing poetry, for example, we prefer the bucolic: pastoral scenes, rhyme, metre, odes.” Her voice sings on until Loraine says, “Where does he sit? Chris. Which desk?”

  Ms. Holt seems surprised, but she points to the back corner. “Some teachers,” she says, “don’t have desks. Just tables, and everything’s a muddle. Hurly-burly. Me, I couldn’t abide it.”

  Loraine goes and sits in Chris’s desk. It’s got a good angle on the room. Farthest from the teacher. By the wall. His name is carved into the top. So is Melody’s. “Is he insolent?” Loraine asks. She doesn’t really care any more. She hopes, in a small way, he is.

  “Not at all. Not a peep from Chrissy.”

  An awful name, Loraine thinks. Not his at all. She wants to raise her hand and say, “Hello, Miss Holt. I’m a whore. A slut. I’m gonna have Johnny Fehr’s baby. Remember Johnny? Picture’s out in the centrum there, on the wall. Class of ′75. Saw it when I walked in. Even back then he had that sneering smile, as if life couldn’t beat him. Anyway, he’s my main man.”

  But, instead, Loraine sighs and pushes herself from the desk. “Thank you,” she says. “I’ve gotta run. Thank you.”

  Mr. Jake Wohlgemut, manager of the Lesser Credit Union, likes Loraine. She can tell. He sits in his chair, gaily swings his short legs, and stares at her neck, her mouth, her breasts, her shoulders. He fiddles with his tie and then says, “A new generator? No problem, Mrs. Wallace.” Feet swing.

  He is married to a tall big-boned woman with black hair. Gloria. Loraine tries to imagine them in bed together. All she can see is Jake working his way up and around Gloria’s body like a mountain climber. They must have fun, she muses. Loraine often pictures couples having sex. She is not mean-spirited about it, just curious. She will talk to another woman and images will begin to flicker and jump; the rabbity hunch of the man’s buttocks, nipples covered by big hands, the vein in the throat beating, the roll of stomachs.

  Today, after getting her loan, she runs into Charlene by the Credit Union door. Charlene works here and is on her way out for lunch. “Do you want to come?” Charlene asks. They’re walking out to the sidewalk together.

  “I can’t,” Loraine says. “I’ve got chores.” She’s studying Charlene’s face which still suffers from the scars of teenage acne. But her body’s large and full, much bigger than Loraine’s. Loraine wonders if Charlene is still holding Johnny at bay, as he claimed. How could you keep a man like Johnny away from a woman like Charlene? She wonders what Charlene’s eyes and mouth do when Johnny is inside her.

  Charlene’s talking. Her hands are moving skyward and Johnny’s name is on her lips. “We’re seeing a counsellor,” she says. “I told Johnny we’d have one more try. He’s like a sheep. Do you want him?” She touches Loraine’s arm, red nails. Loraine smiles at this tall woman. Her size is intimidating. Loraine lifts a hand quickly, says goodbye and walks to her half-ton. A little quip like that is so perfect, she thinks, like the light touch of God on a sinner’s head. As if Char
lene’s known all along.

  Loraine drives home slowly, down Main Street past Bill’s Hardware, Herb’s Electric, the centre, then the cemetery where Johnny’s parents are buried. The mother died and the father couldn’t take it, lonely perhaps.

  There’s an old woman standing in the graveyard. She’s wearing a blue polka-dot dress and holding flowers. Loraine doesn’t recognize her. Beyond the cemetery lies OK Feeds where Johnny’s big dark car sits in the lot. Then quickly the highway begins and Loraine picks up speed. In the distance there is this other graveyard, for buses and combines and tractors—Wayne Wiebe’s Tractor Parts. Ugly. A sin, Loraine thinks, to allow one man to destroy the lay of the land. Past Wayne’s and Lesser is lost behind her. The trees are bare, though there are still leaves blowing across the road. Smoke rises from a far-off field. She approaches the three-mile turn-off and coasts along the gravel road. Her barns become two white lines in the distance. She likes having her own place. She thinks about Charlene and how she’s a woman who needs Johnny. Needs his money, his land, his house. But not Loraine, no. She doesn’t need anything like that. Not today, anyway.