Poached Egg on Toast Read online

  Frances Itani

  Poached Egg

  On Toast

  STORIES

  This one’s for you, Sam.

  (This book belon’s to my darlin’)

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Clayton

  An August Wind

  Megan

  Marx & Co.

  Pack Ice

  P’tit Village

  Truth or Lies

  Separation

  An Evening in the Café

  Scenes from a Pension

  Messages

  Accident

  Touches

  Foolery

  Earthman Pointing

  The Eyes Have It

  Man Without Face

  Sarajevo

  In the Name of Love

  The Thickness of One Sheet of Paper

  What We Are Capable Of

  Poached Egg On Toast

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  With weeping and with laughter

  Still is the story told.

  Lays of Ancient Rome

  As a child, I loved to sit around the dinner table after a meal and listen to stories. I was surrounded by, entertained by, ambushed by stories. It was my understanding that life doled out its portions in stories. No doubt this had something to do with the fact that I have a large extended family. The more relatives one has, the more life stories one hears.

  When I was four, my parents moved our family from eastern Ontario to a small village in western Quebec. Our house was located at the edge of the fast-flowing Ottawa River. After the move, we seemed to be on the catch-up end when it came to hearing family news. Celebratory events and tragedies were narrated from the lips of visitors. Mood was an important part of each telling—excitement, commiseration, mystery, surprise. Stories could be bizarre and, to a child, baffling. Despite the fact that I had four siblings, I managed to be alone a good part of the time, exploring the river’s edge, watching, listening, learning. It was against this backdrop that I began to create my own stories.

  Two decades later, when I started to write fiction, I was immediately attracted to the short story. I read everything I could find in the genre. The writers I most admired were those with the finest observational powers, the ones who trusted their readers, who used understatement, who hinted and suggested, and left room for the reader’s imagination. I was also fortunate enough to meet W.O. Mitchell when I was starting out, and I was greatly encouraged by him.

  I learned from non-judgmental Chekhov, with his ability to brushstroke a single image and transfer a vivid picture to the reader’s mind. I read Heinrich Boll because he was a great storyteller. I loved the works of Virginia Woolf because of the fluidity of her prose, the sense of illusion, the intimacy and rhythm of emotion. I read American and Irish and New Zealand and Czech and South American writers, and I read the literature of my own country and knew that it was somehow about me. At the same time, I was mothering two young children, inventing stories for them, listening carefully to the stories they themselves were creating.

  During a time when we lived in a small German village near Heidelberg, I was writing a letter to my sister in Canada, and asked my seven-year-old daughter if she had a message to send. Her voice dropped into what I recognized as story mode, and she dictated: “I grow fairly easily. First I was born. Then I turned one, then two, then three…” and so on, until she reached seven.

  My son, at the age of eight, told me while tying his shoelaces—a serious moment—”You know, already I have stories to tell my children. Just like you.” It was clear that, for all of us, story was in the blood and the bone.

  The story genre is an exacting one for a writer, a genre with no real rules. For me, each story begins because of unlikely connections. I stow away images and sensory impressions and overheard fragments and somehow, out of the tumble of memory, one thing connects with another to suggest story. The Oxford definition of stow away is to “place a thing where it will not cause an obstruction.” It’s a perfect definition, I think. Writers stow many things until one image nudges another and creates excitement. But that’s only the beginning. Each story holds the mystery of its own creation.

  Of the new and selected stories in this collection, “P’tit Village” is the first story I sold for publication. The others were written over the next twenty-seven years. Some of the settings are drawn from places I’ve lived and travelled. Some are sea stories, set on Canada’s east coast, an area I’ve visited almost every year since my children were young. I have grouped the European stories together, as well as what I think of as the war stories.

  No matter what the story, my interest is in the human condition, the perpetually amazing range of struggles and delights that make up human behaviour. I have always had an underlying preoccupation with theme, but if my characters are preoccupied it is with trying to recover their balance when life knocks them over. And my greatest wish? That I will never lose the fragile, tentative strand of hope I wake with each morning before I sit at my writing table. Every day, I tell myself, Today, today might be the day the wild horses will break in.

  FRANCES ITANI

  April 2004.

  Clayton

  In the morning, he heard their cries. He lay on his bed and for a long time thought of nothing, allowing the cries to wash over him like waves, soothing. And when the sun rose, silvery on the water, he stood at his window in the attic room to which he had carried a narrow spring bed. Zeta had objected to this, knowing that if he took a mattress to the attic, he would also sleep there. But he had taken it anyway, ignoring her. There was a table there, too, a lamp, and electricity. He had run an extension cord up the attic stairs—Pa’s cord. He smiled as he thought of it. Morgan, the undertaker, had left an extension behind when Clayton’s father died and they had needed a lamp up front by the coffin. Clayton had returned to the empty room alone after Pa was carried out and, seeing the forgotten extension on the floor, picked it up and pocketed it, no hesitation. Morgan’s fee had been too high anyway. And Clayton felt a foolish affection for the cord. It had supplied Pa’s last light, hadn’t it?

  At first, Clayton could not see their wide dark backs. But when the double blow, the high bushy blow, rose above the waterline, and when he heard them answering one to another, he felt the quick surge of joy. He knew with certainty they were humpbacks, feeding and playing in the Gulf. Frisking on their way north.

  It had been seven years since he’d seen a whale, although last year he’d come close. He’d heard them through the fog. He’d even stood with raised binoculars many winter hours at the attic window, hoping to catch a glimpse of them on their return, late December, early January. They seemed to stay closer to shore on the home journey, though for what reason Clayton could only guess. Currents? Or maybe food supply. Perhaps, if this was a good year, he’d see the sperm whales, too. Old bulls that left their families every summer and headed for polar waters. These he would recognize by their forward slanting blows and their deep moaning sighs. When he was a boy, he’d learned to differentiate. His father had taught him what to look for. Just as Clayton, in turn, had taught his own children—William, Latham, and his daughter, Maureen. But he and Zeta were alone now. And there were fewer whales. Most years, he saw none at all. You could thank the ships for that, and the whalers, and the oil spills. What was the use even thinking about it?

  Clayton dressed and went downstairs. He shook the fire, waking Zeta, and she entered the kitchen still fastening the tie of her maroon dressing gown. She was silent, and put bowls on the table while he filled the kettle.

  “I’ll be d
oing the road fill today,” he said.

  She didn’t answer; she was sullen and hostile. She hated him taking the bed to the attic, but what did she do if he stayed in the house, if he did sleep in their room? She ignored him. She wanted to have him around, but didn’t pay any attention when he was there. She didn’t know how to please him anymore. For that matter, what did he do to please her? Nothing, that he could think of.

  But despite the fleeting misgivings he had about his relations with Zeta and where they had gone wrong, after breakfast, Clayton was aware of the spring in his step when he left the house, binoculars swinging from his neck. He headed for the shed to get the tractor, and felt Zeta at his back, standing at the half-open screen, though she did not call after him. He hitched to the tractor a low wagon he and Latham had built to hold sand and gravel. Latham had his own farm now, and sons of his own. Clayton sat high on the tractor and bumped along the knotted dirt road that crossed his fields and led along the swells of land, rising, falling, to the creek bed that emptied into the pond, and even farther to the cliffs and then, to the gently sloping beach that tilted into the Gulf. It was the kind of day that made him push back his hat and look around in every direction. Clear skies, an occasional puff of cloud on the horizon, gulls soaring high, the early summer sea lapping and calm, barely a noise. He had to hush, remind himself to listen, face the slightness of the waves to watch rather than hear them as they slipped on shore.

  It was at the creek bed that he began to dig for fill. The road was so full of holes, it was dangerous to have the tractor on it. He would work all week, a little each day. He began to toss sand with his shovel, listening to the spatter against the floor of the shallow wagon. He thought of how he’d always kept a mound of coarse sand at the side of the house for cleaning the bottoms of kitchen pots—especially in summer when the pots were black from the wood stove. He and Zeta and the children used to kneel at the edge of the mound, rotating pots and pans back and forth against the grating, cleansing sand, until the bottoms and part way up the sides were scratched and silvery. Clayton thought about Pa’s cord again, and smiled. If that were the worst thing he had to live with, he’d have a clear conscience indeed. But being a man who still had an occasional song in his heart, there were, of course, other things.

  On the northwest edge of Clayton’s farm, along the cliff, stood a skimpy row of unused one-room cabins. Beside those stood an abandoned barn, both doors off. He could see through to the water, in one doorway and out the next—by standing in the field above it. Inside, there were rotting timbers and tangled grass, but the roof was sound and the ladder nailed firmly to the wall. It was this ladder that Clayton climbed for the first time in fifteen years, his binoculars still on a strap about his neck. At the top, he tested, and saw that he could walk a wide beam from one end to the other, even though the attic floor had fallen through. He could perch on a cross beam and look out either way, north to the beginning expanse of ocean, and south up the slope to the house.

  At the south peak, he held the binoculars to his eyes, wondering, the knowledge of Zeta at the door still in his memory. She was there, yes, but he saw William, too. William, the eldest. Darkness had fallen around him. William had forgotten to take out the ashes, bring in the coal. A bitter winter night, and William was in bed.

  “Don’t wake him,” Zeta said. “I’ll do it myself. He’s only nine and he has school in the morning. Let him make a mistake.”

  But no, if William hadn’t been made to dress and go out to the barn in the dark, he’d have forgotten again. Wouldn’t he?

  Zeta drew her lips together, looking helplessly at Willy’s back. She held the storm door open to give the child light, though she and Clayton and William had known that the coal bin would be in blackness at the end of the yard.

  Oh, Willy, do you still have nightmares about standing on the steps, falling into that pool of fluid darkness?

  Clayton allowed the binoculars to fall back on his chest. William was in his thirties, thirty-six, thirty-seven; Clayton could not remember which. What had he seen? He climbed down and went back to the tractor, and drove to the south field. He inspected his fences along the boundary of the clay road, and spent the rest of the day doing repairs.

  In the morning, Zeta stood at the door looking out after him. He had slept in the attic again, but not restfully. There was something wrong and he did not know what it was. He drove down to the old barn, climbed the ladder and again lifted the binoculars towards the house. He was shocked when Zeta stepped suddenly into focus, pointing a pistol at his face. She aimed, but did not pull the trigger. Instead, she turned towards the poplar and aimed at it. Then, at the stoop from which she hung the clothes. Then, at the birdhouse. Smiling, she turned quickly and went back into the house.

  Feeling weak and perspiring, Clayton realized that she could not have seen him. From the ground below, he could not even see the back door. What had Zeta been doing? What was it about her that had changed so startlingly since he’d left her a half hour ago, standing at the back door like a shadow of his stricken conscience? He remembered that in the glasses her lips had been moving. Singing! She must have been singing. He thought of her smile as she’d turned to go inside. A self-satisfied smile, undisturbed. And her brisk step. He had not seen her move that quickly since before Maureen had left to marry Johnny Cheney from down the road. Johnny was a good ball player but not much good at anything else. Zeta had wanted to open one of the old cabins for the wedding. They had invited Reverend Orland and a few neighbours back after the ceremony. Zeta made lunch and served it on the open cabin veranda, and Maureen and Johnny stayed on and honeymooned in the cabin. No money to go anywhere else. Clayton still held some of the pain he’d felt when he’d driven down to the cabin after leaving the church and had seen what someone had strung up on the veranda post as a joke—a pair of ladies’ violet-coloured panties. Probably one of Johnny’s ball-playing friends. Clayton had ripped down the panties and thrown them into the back of his truck. No joke. Not for his Maureen.

  Clayton climbed down and stood on the cliff before the doorless, gaping barn. His boots smothered some of the early wild strawberries at his feet. Zeta’s little get-together for Maureen had been awkward, a failure. The half-dozen cars had to be driven across the fields to get there, and the occupants had stood around, cheerless in Sunday suits and ties, on the raw wood of the veranda. Maureen and Johnny posed for a camera in the long grass on the cliff, a rough surf behind them. And the veil Maureen had sewn herself lifted beautifully, in one quick swoop of wind, and blew out to sea. Seven and a half months later, their son had been named Clayton, after him.

  But Zeta. What was she up to? He turned to walk back to the creek where he had left the tractor and, as he did so, his ears caught a smart cracking sound, sharp as a rifle shot. He searched the horizon for signs of whales, but could see nothing in the rolling sea. One had probably breached, or smacked its huge flukes against the water. He would not have mistaken the sound.

  When Clayton returned to the house for lunch, Zeta served him and sat in the rocker by the stove with her cup of tea. Hardly a word passed between them. She was so like the uncommunicative woman he had left at the door in the morning, he did not, could not ask about what had intervened. He had not, after all, been meant to see. She would accuse him of spying.

  After lunch, he went upstairs to check the bureau drawer, where he kept his .38. It was there, but it looked as if it hadn’t been touched for years. Unloaded. He replaced it in the drawer and went downstairs to have his nap on the kitchen sofa.

  While he slept, he dreamed. He dreamed that he had gone to Honest Albert’s—the Island Furniture Warehouse—and that Albert was trying to sell him a sofa. The colour was apple green.

  “It’s just what you need for your naps, Clayton. I tell you, Zeta will love it in the kitchen.”

  Albert kept pushing Clayton towards the end of a long, low room that was barnlike and musty. Sofas and daybeds were stacked there, and an enormous SAL
E sign hung from the ceiling. Beneath that, on the floor, was a black coffin filled with nickels.

  “It’s the hottest sale this Island has ever seen,” Honest Albert said. He was laughing and wheezing, and kept pointing to the coffin.

  “Put both those big hands of yours into the box, Clayton, and pull out as many nickels as you can carry.”

  Clayton hesitated. He took a deep breath and dug both hands deep down until he touched the bottom of the coffin. He came up dripping nickels, and emptied his hands of them onto a spotted cloth which Albert had spread out over an Arborite table. The two men counted the nickels—two hundred and thirtythree.

  “Not bad, Clayton! That’s more’n anybody’s got yet. You did all right for yourself. Let me see a minute—that’s eleven dollars and sixty-five cents off the price of the sofa. Zeta’ll be some proud of you.”

  When Clayton drove home with the sofa in the back of the truck, Zeta was standing at the back door with the .38.

  “You’ve been made a fool of again, Clayton,” she shouted. “You’re a damned fool.”

  She took a shot at him and missed. She took another and he ducked behind the sofa that was halfway off the truck. She filled the sofa full of bullets until the gun clicked, empty, and then she began to hum a little tune and turned to go back inside the house. Maureen and Willy and Latham were standing under the poplar, watching.

  “Don’t you think you’ve slept long enough?” Zeta said, standing over him. “I’ve got work to do in here.”

  Clayton looked down at the sofa, but it was a faded blue-grey and the only holes in it were the ones where the springs stuck through. He got up, and splashed water on his face at the kitchen sink, and went back out to the tractor.

  In the morning there was a cool, light drizzle, and Clayton went out in his shirt sleeves to work on the road. A cloud cover hung low over the surface of an indifferent sea; the waves were the darkest blue. Apart from Clayton and an occasional screeching gull, there wasn’t another living thing in sight. He thought of Latham who had always loved every living thing. Latham, second son, released from the bondage of being eldest.