The Journey Prize Stories 27 (21 page)

“Diane says the new guy isn’t working out, either,” the girl tells the boy one afternoon a few days later, when the boy comes up to the house kitchen for tea. “She said that Margaret asked her to give him notice last night.”

“But he’s hasn’t even been here a week! All he does is work! Why is she firing him?”

“Diane said he refused to ask the ducks’ permission before feeding them or giving them water,” the girl says. “He was supposed to ask ‘
permisso?’
And the ducks were supposed to return with ‘
avanti
.’ ”

“That’s ridiculous,” the boy says. “How could Margaret expect him to say that to the ducks? He doesn’t even speak Italian.”

“Diane says he threw a fit when she told him he was fired. He started smashing things in the trailer—the windows, the
fixtures. Diane was afraid he was going to come after her. But all of a sudden he broke down and started sobbing.” The girl pauses. “You never would have thought he was violent, by the look of him.”

“Anybody can turn violent if you back them into a corner,” the boy says.

“I asked Diane if Margaret said anything about us. It’s the third time this week Margaret’s told me that I’m not keeping the fires hot enough. But Diane said she hadn’t heard anything. I think she was lying. There was another empty bottle of wine in the kitchen this morning, and yesterday, while you were in the fields there was a big fight between Margaret and a man who came to deliver a load of hay. Diane says that Margaret refused to pay him again.”

“I guess our chances of getting any money out of her are pretty slim,” says the boy.

“At least we have a place to sleep,” the girl says. “And we have food.”

But that night they eat the rest of the pesto and noodles. The girl knows that their stock will be gone before the week is out.

The girl and the boy spend the rest of the week trying to prepare the farm for Margaret’s guest. They pick up all the rotten hay from the courtyard, and sweep the stones underneath. The girl scours the hearths and the boy puts fresh straw in the chicken coop and scrubs the ducks’ pens with water.

Margaret’s student is due to arrive on the morning of the boy and the girl’s first day off. The night before, the boy and the girl do not get off work until nearly ten o’clock. Margaret asked them to scrub all of the troughs and water-buckets before leaving.

“She was supposed to pay us today,” says the boy, as they trudge up the hill toward the cabin. His teeth are chattering because the sleeves of his jacket are soaked with water. “Did she give you any money?”

“No. Diane said she still hasn’t paid her, either. We’re almost out of food. We need to go to the grocery store.”

“We can go tomorrow,” the boy says.

“I forgot to tell you, Diane said that Margaret asked that we come down to the barn at eight o’clock tomorrow morning, just so I can build up all the fires and you can help with the feed and turnout before the guest arrives.”

The boy doesn’t say anything; the girl knows he’s been looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow morning. He leans forward and wraps his arms around his stomach; his shoulders slump forward, as if he’s in pain.

“Are you all right?”

“It’s nothing. Just stomach cramps.”

“I’m getting so sick of this!” the girl says. “Margaret has no idea what she’s doing! I never see her working with her horses, and her stupid horsemanship rules just make the animals worse off! She only runs this place so she can collect things.”

“Collect things?” the boy asks.

“She collects everything. She takes away the hens’ eggs even though she doesn’t sell them, and nobody’s allowed to eat them. I just end up throwing them out. She collects broken animals and broken machinery. And you should see the weird stuff she collects in the kitchen. What do you think she does upstairs, besides spy on everyone? It smells awful up there. You know, she might actually need help. Like, mental help. If
it was just the farm and the animals, it would be bad enough. But she collects
people
.”

“Actually,” says the boy, his voice hollow, “people are about the only things she doesn’t mind getting rid of.”

The girl is beginning to worry about the boy. He should have been getting more and more confident in his work with each passing day, but he is only becoming more and more anxious. And his stomach pains seem to be getting worse.

The next morning, the girl gets to the house half an hour early so that she can ensure all of the fires are built up. After tidying the kitchen and helping Diane and the boy with the morning feed, she cleans the upstairs bathroom, something she’s been meaning to do since she arrived.

She scrubs the sink and bathtub, and she washes the floor. She prunes the plants that are hanging in baskets in front of the window. She throws out a number of cracked, dirty soaps from the soap dish and some rotting rolls of toilet paper she found beneath the sink.

When she’s finished, she and the boy go back up to the cabin and eat the last of their food for lunch. Then they put on their packs. Diane told the girl that there’s a small hamlet with a general store five or six kilometres down the road from the farm.

Just as they are leaving, they see Margaret’s guest pull through the front gates. He’s a balding man in his mid-forties; he drives a very expensive car.

“Who would ever take a course with Margaret?” the girl asks, as she watches the guest drive down toward the courtyard.

“I don’t know, but Diane says Margaret is very well respected in the Italian horse community. Apparently, her family used to be royalty or something.”

“What does that count for? The horses don’t give a shit.”

The road beyond the gate is smooth walking, and the weather is warm. The light pours down through the lines of orange trees and onto the grassy fields on either side of the road. The girl holds the boy’s hand as they walk.

When they finally arrive at the general store they buy frozen bruschetta and cheese, cereals and madeleines and four pounds of ground beef, milk and carrots and a favourite brand of packaged chocolate cake that they can only find in Italy. Then they pack all of their groceries into their backpacks and start off down the road back to the farm.

“Well,” the boy says. “That was the last of the money.”

“It’s all right,” says the girl. “Margaret
has
to pay us. We’ll stay with her until we have enough money to move on. Then we’ll leave. Maybe we’ll leave in the night, like the Hungarians.”

The boy smiles slightly, but neither of them laughs.

When they arrive back at the cabin they eat for nearly an hour straight, cramming the cakes and the raw noodles into their mouths without cooking them, eating slices of bread and drinking milk straight from the carton.

At eight o’clock, the boy says that he’s going down to feed the chickens. The night is clear and pleasant, and the girl decides to go down with him.

As they are walking down the path, the boy doubles over suddenly, clutching at his stomach.

“What?” the girl asks. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” the boy says. “It’s just the cramps. I think I ate too much. We should have cooked those noodles.”

After a moment, he straightens up and begins walking normally again. But the girl continues to watch him, nervously.

When they enter the courtyard, they meet Diane.

“Well,” Diane says, “I finally got the mule down to the bottom paddock. Margaret asked me to move It this morning when she saw It chewing one of the fences—she didn’t want her guest to see It misbehaving. It’s certainly not happy about it.”

“What does she teach her students, anyway?” the boy asks.

“I don’t know,” Diane says. She pulls a cigarette from her pocket and lights it. “They haven’t been outside with the horses, that’s for sure. They didn’t leave her office all day. I heard Margaret lecturing him, so I went to have a peek for myself. But when I got there all I saw was Margaret standing in front of a big dry-erase board, and her student sitting in front of her, looking up at her like she had him under a spell. When she saw me, she closed the door in my face.” Diane exhales a puff of smoke. “Oh,” she says, “Margaret wants to talk to you, by the way. I was just on my way up to the cabin to get you.”

“Me?” the girl asks.

“That’s what she said.”

“Did she say why?” the boy asks.

“No. Didn’t say why.” Diane exhales another puff.

The girl finds Margaret sitting at the kitchen table, her hands folded neatly in front of her. “Why are you here?” Margaret asks.

“Diane said you asked me to come,” the girl says.

“No, I meant
him
.”

“I thought you wanted to talk to both of us,” the boy says.

Margaret sighs. She runs her hands through her hair and tugs at the ends. “This is what I mean. You do not listen. No one
listens
.” She stretches her cheeks into a quick, taut smile. “I wait all day for you to come back, and you stay away. I fed the fires all day by myself while I am trying to teach my student. I cannot teach when it is so cold, so terribly cold! Feel my hands—” She walks up to the girl and places her small, grubby hands on the girl’s face. The girl sees dark lines of dirt beneath Margaret’s fingernails.

“Margaret,” the girl says, “today was our day off. We went to get groceries—”

“Who used all of this paper towel?” Margaret asks, holding up a diminished roll. “I can’t understand, where did all of this paper towel go?”

“I used it,” says the girl, “to clean the windows.”

“And where are the wine bottles?”

“I washed them and put them in a box underneath the sink.”

“What about the kettle? And the pots?”

“They’re hanging above the stove, on the rack. Look, there.”

“Oh,” Margaret says. “Oh, oh, oh, oh.”

She turns and marches back up the stairs toward her bedroom. At first the girl thinks she’s storming out, but then Margaret’s voice echoes down the stairwell. “Come with me,” she calls. “Come with me, please, now.”

When the girl reaches the top of the stairs, she sees Margaret standing in the bathroom, a hand covering her mouth. Her eyes are wet with tears.

“How could you do this?” she asks. “How?”

“Do what?” the girl asks.

“How could you … move everything? This is not cleaning. This is destroying. It is a disaster!”

Margaret begins to rearrange all of the items that the girl had cleaned. “This was
here
,” she says, moving a toothbrush to a different slot on the wooden toothbrush rack. “And this was here.” She snatches up a rose-shaped soap from the porcelain soap holder and places it next to the large bar of soap that sits in a dish near the taps. “And these were here,” she says, moving the shampoos and conditioners back to their original positions, in the yellow rust-rings the girl had tried to scrub away from around the top of the tub.

“You must never do this again,” Margaret says. “Do you understand? You must never come into my house and touch my things again. We use only one sheet of paper towel to clean the toilet seat, and another to clean out the sink. We do not ever move anything or throw anything away.”

The girl watches Margaret without saying anything.

“Do you understand?” Margaret asks, her voice frantic. “These possessions I need to stay in the relationships that they are, or I am unsure of how anything is. Do you understand? Are you listening?” She takes a deep, shuddering breath. “Come,” she says, when the girl does not answer. “Come down to the kitchen.”

Margaret goes back down the stairs. After a moment, the girl follows. She stands next to the boy, in the kitchen doorway. They are both facing Margaret, who’s next to the woodstove, warming her hands.

“I am afraid I was hoping that one of you could drive the tractor—”

“The tractor?” the boy asks. “What does the tractor have to do with anything?”

“The tractor’s still broken,” the girl says.

“It is still broken because I am very poor,” Margaret says. “And I cannot afford to fix it. I’m afraid that I cannot afford to pay you, either. I need to hire someone who can fix and then drive the tractor. That is the type of work I really need done around here.”

“If you can’t afford to pay us,” the girl says, “then why did you hire us in the first place?”

“I thought I could pay you, of course. But, no pay. I can’t pay. I am very sorry. What I can do is keep you here for a while. For a few more days, anyway, while my student is here. You work while you are here, and you can keep living in the cabin. But I can’t pay you. Right now I need for you to build up the fires—”

“No,” the girl says. “We’re not going to keep working here.” She can hear her voice shaking with the pounding of her heart. “We’re leaving. Today. And we want our money.”

“What?”

“We want our fucking money,” says the boy.

The girl resists the urge to turn toward him, open-mouthed, shocked.

“But I just said that I can’t afford to pay you.”

“We worked,” the girl says. “We deserve to be paid. You’re going to give us our money, and then we’re going to leave.”

“But I don’t have—”

“Give us our
fucking
money,” says the boy. His voice teeters on the border of utter rage. He takes a step toward Margaret. His fists are clenched, as if he’s only just stopping himself from
throttling her. “We’re sick of putting up with all of your bullshit. We want our money, now!”