Liza said yes. She could see now that this gift of a single earring might be seen as childish and pathetic — perhaps intentionally pathetic. Even keeping it as a treasure could seem stupid. But if it was her mother’s, that would be understandable, and it would be a gift of some importance. “You could put it on a chain,” she said. “If you put it on a chain you could wear it around your neck.”
“But I was just thinking that!” Bea said. “I was just thinking it would look lovely on a chain. A silver chain — don’t you think? Oh, Liza, I am just so proud you gave it to me!”
“You could wear it in your nose,” said Ladner. But he said this without any sharpness. He was peaceable now — played out, peaceable. He spoke of Bea’s nose as if it might be a pleasant thing to contemplate.
Ladner and Bea were sitting under the plum trees right behind the house. They sat in the wicker chairs that Bea had brought out from town. She had not brought much — just enough to make islands here and there among Ladner’s skins and instruments. These chairs, some cups, a cushion. The wineglasses they were drinking out of now.
Bea had changed into a dark-blue dress of very thin and soft material. It hung long and loose from her shoulders. She trickled the rhinestones through her fingers, she let them fall and twinkle in the folds of her blue dress. She had forgiven Ladner, after all, or made a bargain not to remember.
Bea could spread safety, if she wanted to. Surely she could. All that is needed is for her to turn herself into a different sort of woman, a hard-and-fast, draw-the-line sort, clean-sweeping, energetic, and intolerant.
What Bea has been sent to do, she doesn’t see.
Only Liza sees.
IV
LIZA LOCKED THE door as you had to, from the outside. She put the key in the plastic bag and the bag in the hole in the tree. She moved towards the snowmobile, and when Warren didn’t do the same she said, “What’s the matter with you?”
Warren said, “What about the window by the back door?”
Liza breathed out noisily. “Ooh, I’m an idiot!” she said. “I’m an idiot ten times over!”
Warren went back to the window and kicked at the bottom pane. Then he got a stick of firewood from the pile by the tin shed and was able to smash the glass out. “Big enough so a kid could get in,” he said.
“How could I be so stupid?” Liza said. “You saved my life.”
“Our life,” Warren said.
The tin shed wasn’t locked. Inside it he found some cardboard boxes, bits of lumber, simple tools. He tore off a piece of cardboard of a suitable size. He took great satisfaction in nailing it over the pane that he had just smashed out. “Otherwise animals could get in,” he said to Liza.
When he was all finished with this job, he found that Liza had walked down into the snow between the trees. He went after her.
“I was wondering if the bear was still in there,” she said.
He was going to say that he didn’t think bears came this far south, but she didn’t give him the time. “Can you tell what the trees are by their bark?” she said.
Warren said he couldn’t even tell from their leaves. “Well, maples,” he said. “Maples and pines.”
“Cedar,” said Liza. “You’ve got to know cedar. There’s a cedar. There’s a wild cherry. Down there’s birch. The white ones. And that one with the bark like gray skin? That’s a beech. See, it had letters carved on it, but they’ve spread out, they just look like any old blotches now.”
Warren wasn’t interested. He only wanted to get home. It wasn’t much after three o’clock, but you could feel the darkness collecting, rising among the trees, like cold smoke coming off the snow.
HATESHIP, FRIENDSHIP, COURTSHIP, LOVESHIP, MARRIAGE
YEARS AGO, before the trains stopped running on so many of the branch lines, a woman with a high, freckled forehead and a frizz of reddish hair came into the railway station and inquired about shipping furniture.
The station agent often tried a little teasing with women, especially the plain ones who seemed to appreciate it.
“Furniture?” he said, as if nobody had ever had such an idea before. “Well. Now. What kind of furniture are we talking about?”
A dining-room table and six chairs. A full bedroom suite, a sofa, a coffee table, end tables, a floor lamp. Also a china cabinet and a buffet.
“Whoa there. You mean a houseful.”
“It shouldn’t count as that much,” she said. “There’s no kitchen things and only enough for one bedroom.”
Her teeth were crowded to the front of her mouth as if they were ready for an argument.
“You’ll be needing the truck,” he said.
“No. I want to send it on the train. It’s going out west, to Saskatchewan.”
She spoke to him in a loud voice as if he was deaf or stupid, and there was something wrong with the way she pronounced her words. An accent. He thought of Dutch — the Dutch were moving in around here — but she didn’t have the heft of the Dutch women or the nice pink skin or the fair hair. She might have been under forty, but what did it matter? No beauty queen, ever.
He turned all business.
“First you’ll need the truck to get it to here from wherever you got it. And we better see if it’s a place in Saskatchewan where the train goes through. Otherways you’d have to arrange to get it picked up, say, in Regina.”
“It’s Gdynia,” she said. “The train goes through.”
He took down a greasy-covered directory that was hanging from a nail and asked how she would spell that. She helped herself to the pencil that was also on a string and wrote on a piece of paper from her purse:
“What kind of nationality would that be?”
She said she didn’t know.
He took back the pencil to follow from line to line.
“A lot of places out there it’s all Czechs or Hungarians or Ukrainians,” he said. It came to him as he said this that she might be one of those. But so what, he was only stating a fact.
“Here it is, all right, it’s on the line.”
“Yes,” she said. “I want to ship it Friday — can you do that?”
“We can ship it, but I can’t promise what day it’ll get there,” he said. “It all depends on the priorities. Somebody going to be on the lookout for it when it comes in?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a mixed train Friday, two-eighteen p.m. Truck picks it up Friday morning. You live here in town?”
She nodded, writing down the address. 106 Exhibition Road.
It was only recently that the houses in town had been numbered, and he couldn’t picture the place, though he knew where Exhibition Road was. If she’d said the name McCauley at that time he might have taken more of an interest, and things might have turned out differently. There were new houses out there, built since the war, though they were called “wartime houses.” He supposed it must be one of those.
“Pay when you ship,” he told her.
