he could be moved.
If Gladys wanted this too, she didn’t give any signs of it. It is impossible for me to tell with women like her whether they are as thick and deadly as they seem, not wanting anything much but opportunities for irritation and contempt, or if they are all choked up with gloomy fires and useless passions.
Marjorie and Lily talked about marriage. They did not have much good to say about it, in spite of their feeling that it was a state nobody should be allowed to stay out of. Marjorie said that shortly after her marriage she had gone into the woodshed with the intention of swallowing Paris green.
“I’d have done it,” she said. “But the man came along in the grocery truck and I had to go out and buy the groceries. This was when we lived on the farm.”
Her husband was cruel to her in those days, but later he suffered an accident — he rolled the tractor and was so badly hurt he would be an invalid all his life. They moved to town, and Marjorie was the boss now.
“He starts to sulk the other night and say he don’t want his supper. Well, I just picked up his wrist and held it. He was scared I was going to twist his arm. He could see I’d do it. So I say, ‘You
They talked about their father. He was a man of the old school. He had a noose in the woodshed (not the Paris green woodshed — this would be an earlier one, on another farm), and when they got on his nerves he used to line them up and threaten to hang them. Lily, who was the younger, would shake till she fell down. This same father had arranged to marry Marjorie off to a crony of his when she was just sixteen. That was the husband who had driven her to the Paris green. Their father did it because he wanted to be sure she wouldn’t get into trouble.
“Hot blood,” Lily said.
I was horrified, and asked, “Why didn’t you run away?”
“His word was law,” Marjorie said.
They said that was what was the matter with kids nowadays — it was the kids that ruled the roost. A father’s word should be law. They brought up their own kids strictly, and none had turned out bad yet. When Marjorie’s son wet the bed she threatened to cut off his dingy with the butcher knife. That cured him.
They said ninety percent of the young girls nowadays drank, and swore, and took it lying down. They did not have daughters, but if they did and caught them at anything like that they would beat them raw. Irene, they said, used to go to the hockey games with her ski pants slit and nothing under them, for convenience in the snowdrifts afterward. Terrible.
I wanted to point out some contradictions. Marjorie and Lily themselves drank and swore, and what was so wonderful about the strong will of a father who would insure you a lifetime of unhappiness? (What I did not see was that Marjorie and Lily were not unhappy altogether — could not be, because of their sense of consequence, their pride and style.) I could be enraged then at the lack of logic in most adults’ talk — the way they held to their pronouncements no matter what evidence might be presented to them. How could these women’s hands be so gifted, so delicate and clever — for I knew they would be as good at dozens of other jobs as they were at gutting; they would be good at quilting and darning and painting and papering and kneading dough and setting out seed lings — and their thinking so slapdash, clumsy, infuriating?
Lily said she never let her husband come near her if he had been drinking. Marjorie said since the time she nearly died with a hemorrhage she never let her husband come near her, period. Lily said quickly that it was only when he’d been drinking that he tried anything. I could see that it was a matter of pride not to let your husband come near you, but I couldn’t quite believe that “come near” meant “have sex.” The idea of Marjorie and Lily being sought out for such purposes seemed grotesque. They had bad teeth, their stomachs sagged, their faces were dull and spotty. I decided to take “come near” literally.
THE TWO WEEKS before Christmas was a frantic time at the Turkey Barn. I began to go in for an hour before school as well as after school and on weekends. In the morning, when I walked to work, the streetlights would still be on and the morning stars shining. There was the Turkey Barn, on the edge of a white field, with a row of big pine trees behind it, and always, no matter how cold and still it was, these trees were lifting their branches and sighing and straining. It seems unlikely that on my way to the Turkey Barn, for an hour of gutting turkeys, I should have experienced such a sense of promise and at the same time of perfect, impenetrable mystery in the universe, but I did. Herb had something to do with that, and so did the cold snap — the series of hard, clear mornings. The truth is, such feelings weren’t hard to come by then. I would get them but not know how they were to be connected with anything in real life.
One morning at the Turkey Barn there was a new gutter. This was a boy eighteen or nineteen years old, a stranger named Brian. It seemed he was a relative, or perhaps just a friend, of Herb Abbott’s. He was staying with Herb. He had worked on a lake boat last summer. He said he had got sick of it, though, and quit.
What he said was “Yeah, fuckin’ boats, I got sick of that.”
Language at the Turkey Barn was coarse and free, but this was one word never heard there. And Brian’s use of it seemed not careless but flaunting, mixing insult and provocation. Perhaps it was his general style that made it so. He had amazing good looks: taffy hair, bright blue eyes, ruddy skin, well-shaped body — the sort of good looks nobody disagrees about for a moment. But a single, relentless notion had got such a hold on him that he could not keep from turning all his assets into parody. His mouth was wet-looking and slightly open most of the time, his eyes were half shut, his expression a hopeful leer, his movements indolent, exaggerated, inviting. Perhaps if he had been put on a stage with a microphone and a guitar and let grunt and howl and wriggle and excite, he would have seemed a true celebrant. Lacking a stage, he was unconvincing. After a while he seemed just like somebody with a bad case of hiccups — his insistent sexuality was that monotonous and meaningless.
If he had toned down a bit, Marjorie and Lily would probably have enjoyed him. They could have kept up a game of telling him to shut his filthy mouth and keep his hands to himself. As it was, they said they were sick of him, and meant it. Once, Marjorie took up her gutting knife. “Keep your distance,” she said. “I mean from me and my sister and that kid.”
She did not tell him to keep his distance from Gladys, because Gladys wasn’t there at the time and Marjorie would probably not have felt like protecting her anyway. But it was Gladys Brian particularly liked to bother. She would throw down her knife and go into the washroom and stay there ten minutes and come out with a stony face. She didn’t say she was sick anymore and go home, the way she used to. Marjorie said Morgan was mad at Gladys for sponging and she couldn’t get away with it any longer.
Gladys said to me, “I can’t stand that kind of thing. I can’t stand people mentioning that kind of thing and that kind of — gestures. It makes me sick to my stomach.”
I believed her. She was terribly white. But why, in that case, did she not complain to Morgan? Perhaps relations between them were too uneasy, perhaps she could not bring herself to repeat or describe such things. Why did none of us complain — if not to Morgan, at least to Herb? I never thought of it. Brian seemed just something to put up with, like the freezing cold in the gutting shed and the smell of blood and waste. When Marjorie and Lily did threaten to complain, it was about Brian’s laziness.
He was not a good gutter. He said his hands were too big. So Herb took him off gutting, told him he was to sweep and clean up, make packages of giblets, and help load the truck. This meant that he did not have to be in any one place or doing any one job at a given time, so much of the time he did nothing. He would start sweeping up, leave that and mop the tables, leave that and have a cigarette, lounge against the table bothering us until Herb called him to help load. Herb was very busy now and spent a lot of time making deliveries, so it was possible he did not know the extent of Brian’s idleness.
“I don’t know why Herb don’t fire you,” Marjorie said. “I guess the answer is he don’t want you hanging around sponging on him, with no place to go.”
“I know where to go,” said Brian.
“Keep your sloppy mouth shut,” said Marjorie. “I pity Herb. Getting saddled.”
ON THE LAST school day before Christmas we got out early in the afternoon. I went home and changed my clothes and came in to work at about three o’clock. Nobody was working. Everybody was in the gutting shed, where Morgan Elliott was swinging a cleaver over the gutting table and yelling. I couldn’t make out what the yelling was about, and thought someone must have made a terrible mistake in his work; perhaps it had been me. Then I
