But before they’d started moving, Cynthia drove in and pulled up beside them in the ’89 Honda Arvo had found abandoned in a gravel pit and spent one Christmas week bringing back to life. Had she decided to come along too?
She left her motor running while she got out of the car to hand him a tin box. “My banana loaf, as promised!” she said. “Already sliced. Something for when you stop for a break. I forgot to give it to Bert with the flowers.” Her face was a little flushed, like a young girl excited by her own generosity. She’d had a reputation as a no-nonsense teacher, but in retirement she’d never been anything but generous and kindly-intended. Before getting back in her car she put a hand
on his and squeezed. “You’re a good man, Arvo — going to all this trouble for our Martin. Make sure you come back safe.”
She winked, as though she suspected he was up to some sort of mischief but couldn’t find it in herself to object.
They would take the Old Highway that wandered leisurely along the coastline rather than the inland freeway where they’d be constantly buffeted by blasts of wind from trucks roaring past at speeds the makers of a 1930 vehicle could not have imagined. On the Old Highway there would be less traffic and, except for the odd lunatic, most of it slower. This meant they would be travelling past small farms and threading their way through towns and villages, never far from civilization.
The sky was without clouds but still pale, as it often was this early on summer mornings.
Before leaving Portuguese Creek behind they passed several small stump ranches with their green fields and large gardens, their houses out front too close to the highway, with barns and chicken coops and horse paddocks behind. They passed a series of garden stalls at the side of the road selling baskets of raspberries and boxes of yellow squash and long beans.
When they had begun a straight stretch of highway that passed by the long field of a potato farm, Cynthia drove past in her Honda, honking and waving and going far too fast, then disappeared beyond the Henry J and around the corner. If she was heading in to town, Arvo thought, she would discover the stores were not yet open.
Of course she would know this. She must be on a mission of mercy, answering a call for help from one of her lazy nephews.
He followed the Henry J down the highway at a steady pace, but soon grew tired of giving a return salute to all those who yahooed and waved an arm out the window while passing him. He made an
effort to stare straight ahead and behave as though he were just another of those farmers who drove their tractors down the Old Highway pretending not to hear the honking behind them and caring little that they were causing impatient drivers to go crazy. It wasn’t as though he were hogging the road. If they were patient enough to wait a few minutes they’d soon find a break in the traffic and sail by.
At a certain speed, curses sounded the same as praise when flung from an open window.
Some of them would think he was crazy if they’d known what he was up to. Off on a fool’s mission? Well, at least he knew that Myrtle Birdsong was still alive. He’d torn out the newspaper article about the new theatre and kept it in his top dresser drawer, along with the accompanying photograph. Even in the grainy picture he could see in her face what he recalled seeing in the girl — smiling eyes, sharp cheekbones, a certain tilt to her head. His mother had predicted a classic beauty, declaring “It’s in the bones.”
He followed the Henry J down the highway past small farms and the occasional cluster of houses and a long flat-roofed school where children chased one another around the building. The motor ran a little rough but it might still be working out a few kinks.
Beyond a long straight stretch of road lined with farm market buildings, a hitchhiker stood on the gravel shoulder waving a hand in a manner that suggested desperation, but Arvo was not about to invite someone to sit beside him and chew his ear off the whole long way to Myrtle Birdsong’s door. Even so, there was little else he could do when he was close enough to see that the hitch-hiker was Cynthia. Her Honda was parked on the grassy patch between a broad-leafed maple and a pasture fence. Peterson and Herbie Brewer must have driven right past without noticing her attempt to flag down a ride.
“You change your mind and want your loaf back?”
“My car’ll be safe where it is,” she said, lowering his toolbox to the floor and climbing in beside him. She passed a hand across the softness of his mother’s blanket. “If you’re tempted to whisk me off to sunny California, please warn me now. I’ll phone my niece to come by and drive the Honda home.”
“You know where I’m going.”
“I do,” Cynthia said, “but you can’t blame a girl for dreaming.” She waited until they were moving to add, “Fact is, I decided I was a fool to let you men go off to get Martin and have all the fun without me. My niece will look after the place till I’m back. I warned her — I said, Who knows what wondrous things could happen to me before I see you again! She’s the one put California in my head.”
“If you were hoping for California, you didn’t consider this vehicle. Neither of us is likely to live as long as it would take this hearse to get us there. For the return trip someone else would have to drive, with the two of us laid out in boxes in the back.”
“Don’t worry,” she said, dismissing worry with a tilted hand. “Riding as far as town will have to do. My sister can drive me back to my car. I just don’t like to be left out altogether. My brothers left me out of
everything
! Henry used to blame them for all my flaws.”
Arvo had never thought of Cynthia as someone with flaws. She could have a sharp tongue now and then, but only when discussing the shortcomings of people who put themselves in the public eye. He knew she had no trouble running that little “hobby farm” without Henry, and had probably been the brains, or at least the commonsense, behind the drive-in movie theatre.
Cynthia had been joking about California, but she was not the first woman to suggest a trip together. Long ago, Margot Pearson — Abner’s widow — had invited him to drive her to her brother’s wedding in Calgary. He could see no reason for refusing — the woods
had shut down for fire season, he had no plans of his own, he was curious to see Calgary, and he had always enjoyed Margot’s company at community whist drives and local weddings. They had got along well throughout the trip, which included motel stopovers in Vancouver and Kelowna, so it was impossible now to know what might have happened if she hadn’t run into an old flame in the lobby of their Calgary hotel — just arrived from Kingston for the wedding.
As they were passing by the bright green grass of the Lazy Meadows golf course, where town shopkeepers and lawyers took out their frustrations on little white balls, Arvo thought of his father’s opinion that it was an activity for men who had nothing better to do with their hands. He had remained faithful to his father’s bias even though this particular golf course was owned by Pentti Virtanen — son of Matti Virtanen, who’d been known simply as The Big Finn when he was alive, and brother to the hefty Leena Virtanen who had offered to bake Arvo her famous
kula-kukko
to help him relax after his first game on the family links. He’d always enjoyed a good feed of perch-and-pork loaf and even liked the flirtatious Leena Virtanen a little — but he liked neither the dish nor the woman enough to take up playing golf.
He’d been told that Leena’s mother Helvi had been a winner of beauty pageants back in her home city of Kajaani. She’d been much older than the young Arvo when she’d arrived in town, and had offered to overlook the difference in their ages, and even her engagement to The Big Finn, if Arvo would forget whoever it was he was saving himself for and expend some of that pent-up frustrated love on her. “You must be just about ready to explode,” she’d said, and made it clear she wanted to be around when this happened. She had a certain way of letting just the tip of her tongue show between her red lips. He had been flattered, but too slow to respond. Her marriage
to Matti had cooled her interest in Arvo for a while, but at some point she had let him know that her husband would soon drink himself into his grave, leaving the coast clear enough for even a puritan like Arvo to fill the void. But it had been Helvi herself who’d died soon after that. The Big Finn’s heavy drinking did not prevent him from taking a second wife within the year.
No one was out on the golf course this morning. Sprinklers that had probably been going all night continued to send water flying in great wide circles. Arvo thought, as he’d thought many times before, that it was a crime this large piece of cleared grass-seeded property was not supporting cattle, at least while the golfers were home and sleeping in their beds. Expensive mowers would no longer be needed. The cows could be rounded up and locked in a pen each morning before the Mercedes and
BMW
s began to turn in off the road.
Of course he knew this wasn’t practical, but he liked to imagine fat Pentti Virtanen out there every morning with wheelbarrow and shovel, earning his keep for a change. He could imagine a city councillor yelling at Pentti after stepping in something Pentti had overlooked.
Once they’d crossed the river bridge and entered town, the unnaturally slow pace allowed Arvo to notice that most of the single-storey stucco shops — whether they were selling menswear, bedroom furniture, fancy cakes, or children’s toys — had a
Reynard Realty
sign in one corner of the window, though there was no mention of the property being for sale. Since Ernie Reynard owned a number of these buildings, he must have convinced his tenant merchants that advertising his business was a requisite part of the lease.
Of course Ernie Reynard was not the owner of the real-estate company only, but was also the owner of a lumber company as well as the construction company that used his lumber to build houses on the
land his real-estate company sold, as well as the paving company that finished the roads that led to the houses and stores he’d built. There was a Reynard Realty sign even in the window of the restaurant where Peterson and Herbie had decided to stop. “For a decent cup of coffee,” Peterson said, “and a little more breakfast before going any farther at this pace of a lazy snail.”
Arvo dropped Cynthia off at the restaurant and pulled ahead to
Buster’s Service
for a fill-up. Of course he first had to convince the boy running the place that a vehicle built in the ’30s could use modern gasoline if its engine had not been destroyed in the era of leaded gas. In order to survive the volley of questions that followed this, he discovered himself to be a little hard of hearing.
By the time he’d joined the others, Peterson had ordered the
Special Steak Breakfast
and Herbie had ordered scrambled eggs, but Cynthia said she was about to call her sister to come and get her. “I’m content,” she said. “I’ve had my ride. And Arvo refuses to take me to California.”
But she returned to the table after making her phone call and sat with the others while they waited for their breakfast to arrive and listened to Herbie Brewer complain about their pace. “I never thought we’d be going this slow. If me ’n’ Bert waited here ’til you phoned that you’re getting close to Martin’s hospital I bet we could catch up before you even found a space in the parking lot.”
“Arvo needs you boys to lead the way,” Cynthia said on Arvo’s behalf.
“Yes Mam,” Peterson said to the ceiling. “But I don’t see a reason for it. He ought to find his way without us, since this same road that goes past here runs the whole damn way to the city and Martin’s morgue.”
“Still,” Cynthia said. “He’ll be safer out on that road with an escort
car ahead of him.” She got to her feet. “Well, my sister will be here in a minute. You boys go have your fun. Riding shotgun in that hearse was ruining my hair.”
Eating their breakfast was an opportunity to congratulate themselves for going on this brave and generous mission. They could have taken the easy way and arranged for a professional funeral director to bring Martin home. Herbie Brewer couldn’t see why they hadn’t driven down in the Henry J and brought Martin home in a coffin tied to the roof.
“Eat your eggs,” Peterson said. “What we’re doing is giving Martin the sort of final journey a friend and important man deserves.”
They were so impressed with their mission on Martin’s behalf that it seemed only right that they spend a little time admiring Martin and recalling his many accomplishments as the local Member of Parliament in Ottawa. It was public knowledge that he had never missed a day in his seat while Parliament was in session. The few times he had spoken in the House he had not been heard because of the shouted insults from the party in power. Though everyone knew that Martin had prepared one fine hard-hitting speech on a topic related to children’s rights, it was rumoured that the party leader had insisted on reading the speech ahead of time and then decided to let an MP from Toronto speak on the topic instead.
“Poor bugger,” Herbie said. “He never had a chance of being reelected after they stabbed him in the back.”
“He never tried,” Peterson said. “He hated the Ottawa winter, he didn’t know how to ski, he’d never skated in his life, he felt like a prisoner in his own home — which wasn’t a home at all but some rented suite in a big old drafty apartment block. No wonder he decided not to run again.”
“He didn’t decide not to run again,” Arvo said, as gently as he
knew how. “Someone in Ottawa decided they knew what we needed better than we did ourselves. They figured he wasn’t the one we wanted to represent us, whatever we really thought. What else could he do but step aside?”
“Sonsabitches,” Peterson said. “No wonder the country’s in a mess.”
David Henderson came in through the door, taking off his black leather cap. He stood looking around for a moment, running his fingers through his greying hair. Instead of coming over to join Arvo and the others, he sat in the nearest empty booth and waited for Arvo to join him.
“Excuse me,” Arvo said. “I’ve got a little business to talk over with Dave.”