A Strange Kind of Comfort Read online

  Jack clanks across the field with a load of rocks, backs the tractor up to the stone pile, and dumps it from the picker. When he sees her, he waves from the cab and climbs down.

  “Hey, you. What’s up?” Jack is smiling, something he hasn’t been doing much of lately. She doesn’t want to give him the bad news about the calf; he’s been losing sleep as it is over the rising costs of crop inputs.

  “I found one of the missing calves.”

  “Where?” Jack looks momentarily hopeful.

  “Down by the river.” Sarah motions with her head. “It was dead. Torn apart.”

  “Damn it.” Jack takes off his cap and pulls a hand through his hair. “You sure it was ours?”

  “Our tag,” Sarah says. “It looked to me like it was ripped up for sport and just left there. Its neck slashed open and then gutted from behind. Whatever killed it left it for the crows.”

  “Can you show me?”

  Sarah doesn’t want to go back. She’ll tell Jack exactly where she found the calf, but she doesn’t want to see it again. The feasting maggots. The crows swooping down, picking rotting flesh from tender bones.

  * * *

  Sarah gives the whiteboard a quick glance as she walks into the common room at Sunny Haven. June 22. Beanbag toss, chair yoga, the Veselka dancers are coming to perform! The residents themselves never read the posted agenda; it’s there for the benefit of family members who, like Sarah, rarely look at it either. Chairs are lined up along the wall, most of the residents propped up like rag dolls, supported by bolsters and towels rolled and stuffed around them. They’ve been fed their lunch and now wait for the afternoon’s events to begin. Some of the able-bodied ones, like Sarah’s father, take part in the activities, although getting him to co-operate can be a challenge.

  Her father is standing by the activity director’s office, clutching an inflated beach ball to his chest while a young nurse’s aide pleads with him to give it to her. Sarah doesn’t recognize the brown polyester pants and burgundy cardigan he is wearing. The sweater is improperly buttoned and one side hangs like a small flag between his legs. An ankle monitor, meant to keep him from escaping the building, is cuffed above his left shoe. The staff lets him dress himself and Sarah is grateful, at least, that he is allowed that last bit of independence.

  He turns away from the aide and notices Sarah standing in the foyer. His eyes widen as though he is surprised to see her and, for a moment, Sarah thinks perhaps he recognizes her. But just as suddenly, his eyes narrow and she realizes that, of course, her father doesn’t know who she is.

  “Hi, Dad,” Sarah says briskly as she walks over. “Are you giving Cara a hard time?” She winks at the newest member of the staff.

  “He always has to be the first at every game we play,” Cara says. “Some days I don’t know what to do with him.”

  Sarah gently eases the beach ball away from her father and speaks softly in the same calming voice she once used to settle her own misbehaving toddlers. “Dad, you can’t have the ball just now. Let’s let Cara have it, okay? Why don’t we have a little visit first, just you and me, until it’s time to start the game?” She hands Cara the ball. “I’ll just take Dad back to his room for a bit while you get things ready here.”

  Cara looks relieved. “Thanks, Mrs. Bilyk. Addie usually has the best luck. She can get your dad to do just about anything, but it’s her day off.”

  It strikes Sarah as incredibly ironic that her father should listen to anything Adeline Prentiss has to say. Addie and Sarah have been friends since elementary school. She was a champion at one-liners and teacher impersonations back then, often making the whole class laugh until she was sent to the principal’s office. Addie was, as Sarah’s father used to say, a real shit disturber.

  Sarah takes her father’s arm and leads him down the hall to his own small room. When he first moved in, she tried to make the room comfortable and familiar, setting up the small walnut side table, marred by a milky water stain, on one wall. Her father had picked it up from the nuisance grounds when she was a child, pointing out the paper tag stapled under it — Walberg’s Fine Furniture — and saying it must have belonged to Elvina Webb because who else but the Webbs would throw out a perfectly good table? Sarah used to polish it with lemon-scented furniture oil and hide the spot with a crocheted doily. Now, the water stain is covered by framed photographs: Allison and Jason’s wedding picture, Maeve and Toni’s high-school graduation photos, and a baby picture of Connor. The old rocker recliner with the arms nearly worn through sits in the corner and a faded hand-stitched patchwork quilt made long ago by Sarah’s grandmother is folded neatly at the foot of the bed. Sometimes, Sarah thinks she can still smell the musty odour of her father’s house in it.

  Her father sits on the quilt, eyeing her, as though he wonders what adventure is about to unfold. Sarah straightens the items on his nightstand and fills a glass with ice water from the pitcher. She worries that he forgets to drink enough water and the staff, as busy as they are, don’t remind him as often as they should. He shakes his head, tightens his lips, and stares at the glass as though it’s laced with poison.

  She sighs and puts the glass back on the nightstand. “I’ll just leave it here. You can take a sip whenever you like.” She sits on the recliner and tries to think of something to tell him. A year earlier, he would listen carefully, leaning forward to take in her every word, forehead wrinkled, as though he understood what she was telling him about Jack — what he was planting or spraying or harvesting — or whatever the girls were up to that week. But lately, he has been sitting on the edge of the bed, legs swinging, muttering to himself, seemingly oblivious to the fact she is even there.

  “Mary died,” he says, leaping suddenly from the bed. His eyes widen as though he’s just remembered or has been saving this bit of information until her visit. “Mary died,” he says again, and Sarah wonders, Who is Mary? She knows her father had a sister by that name who drowned when she was a toddler, and she wonders if that’s what he’s remembering. He points to the room across the hall, empty now after the passing of George Feschuk, who died a month earlier. Richard, the maintenance man, was busy painting George’s room last week, and earlier today Sarah noticed the furniture was back inside.

  Cara pokes her head into the room and announces, “Activities starting in about five minutes.”

  “Mary died,” he says to Cara this time, growing more agitated. Cara looks alarmed, as though she might have overlooked a dead body somewhere on the floor, and Sarah quickly says, “I think he means George,” motioning to the room across the hall. “He must sense something’s up.”

  “Oh,” Cara says, looking relieved. “No, it’s George, Joe,” she says, raising her voice. “It’s George who died.”

  Sarah settles her father and motions to the room across the hall. “It looks like it’s all ready for someone to move in. Do you know yet who it is?”

  Cara hesitates for a moment. “I’m really not supposed to say, but” — she looks over her shoulder and drops her voice — “it’s Caroline Webb. Mrs. High and Mighty, that’s what Addie called her.”

  “Really?” Sarah is startled to hear Caroline’s name.

  “Said the whole town used to worship the ground the Webbs walked on. Some still do.” Cara gives Joe her arm and leads him to the door. “Hardly anyone sees her, that’s what Addie said. Shut away in that old brick house.” She looks suddenly surprised. “You must know her. The Webbs live beside you, don’t they?”

  Sarah nods, not quite believing the news although she did hear Caroline had broken a hip after a fall a few months ago. It was Lois Cornforth who found her, lying injured on the basement floor, when she came by with Caroline’s weekly grocery order. Lois’s husband, Shorty, farms the land Caroline still owns, and takes care of clearing the snow and keeping the grass mowed in the yard. Sarah can’t imagine Caroline moving in to Sunny Haven where each resident and all of their frailties are on such public display.

  “So …�
� Cara is saying. “Do you ever see her?”

  Sarah used to see Caroline out in the yard tending to her flowers in a huge straw hat, her face protected from the sun and the curious eyes of anyone driving by. There were so many times Sarah had wanted to pull in, walk out to the gardens and see how Caroline was doing. It wasn’t easy for her to erase the memories of that old house, to pretend the years she knew Caroline had never existed just because Jack didn’t want them to.

  After her husband, Eldon, died, sightings of Caroline grew more and more infrequent. Lois told Sarah that Caroline went away for extended periods of time but she’d never tell Lois where she’d been. Sarah wondered if it was her daughter, Becca, she’d been visiting and why she wouldn’t want anyone to know that.

  Sarah would occasionally catch a glimpse of Caroline in a window, a slight flicker of movement behind a wavering curtain, and it brought her a strange kind of comfort, just knowing she was still there.

  On her way home, Sarah stops at her father’s house. It’s been empty since he moved in to Sunny Haven, and Jack has finally convinced her it’s time to let it go. Her grandfather, James Coyle, built the house on Railway Avenue next to Coyle’s Blacksmith & Repair in the 1930s and raised his family there. When Sarah’s father took over the business, he inherited the ramshackle two-storey house, never leaving it until he nearly burned the place down.

  Sarah never lived anywhere else; she went straight from her father’s house to the house trailer on the farm after she married Jack. She was the middle child and the only girl in a family of rowdy brothers. Patrick and Paul were nearly teenagers when Sarah was born, followed right after by Brian, then Charlie, each of them two years apart. Her father liked to say the two older boys were for him, tough and hard and meant to grow up fast to work with him in his shop while the others, coming so much later, were extras for their mother. And Sarah came to believe her mother must have felt that way, too. She and her little brothers were nothing but extra work, additional mouths to feed. More babies to take care of when their mother might have believed she was free of those demands.

  Her father used to tell the story of how he’d met their mother at a country dance. She was dancing a polka with a bowlegged farmer, her head tipped back and all those black curls flowing out around her; she was delicate and small-boned, nothing at all like the other Ukrainian farm girls with their wide shoulders and broad backs. Joe was instantly drawn to her and he asked her for the next dance. Wiry and fast and light on his feet, he swept her away.

  Time and pain have dulled most of Sarah’s memories of her mother, but there is one, still, she vividly remembers. It was July; Sarah was six years old, too young at the time to understand the impact her mother’s absence would have on the rest of her young life. Sarah’s father and Patrick were painting the house a turquoise blue, a colour Sarah imagined the deep sea might be. Her father was scraping the windowsills with a wire brush and Pat was high on a ladder, smiling down at her with a paintbrush in his hand. With a flick of his wrist, a drop of blue, the size of a penny, splashed on her white canvas shoe. Her mother poked her head from a second-storey window and leaned out, resting her forearms on the sill. She wore a sleeveless yellow dress the colour of daffodils, her curly hair tumbling over her shoulders. Pat tapped her nose with his paint brush and the sweet sound of her seldom-heard laughter unfurled on the wind.

  Now only a tinge of that mermaid blue is left on the north side of the house where a faded For Sale sign pokes out of the tall grass in the small yard. There were a few phone calls in the first few months after Sarah put up the sign, but no serious offers. She isn’t surprised; the house is too close to the tracks for anyone to want to live there. In the winter, vandals kicked in the door and littered the place with beer cans and trash. Jack’s been complaining about the ongoing costs of insurance and taxes and he worries about their liability should a teenager fall through the crumbling floorboards. The time has come to tear the house down. Let the roof collapse on the scant memories lingering in the empty rooms and bury the restless spirit of her mother in the rubble.

  Sarah steps through shattered glass to get inside. A faint odour of smoke still lingers, even though it’s been nearly three years since the fire. She had noticed her father becoming increasingly forgetful and irritable that year so she started dropping in more often, doing all his errands and dropping off casseroles he could heat up himself. One evening she came over with a pot of soup to find the house filled with black, oily smoke. Her father had put a full carton of eggs in the oven and set it to broil. Afterward, the case worker from the Health Authority told Sarah her father could no longer live on his own. He moved in with Sarah and Jack for a while but Sarah could barely keep track of him. He was constantly on the move, slipping out of the house whenever Sarah’s back was turned. Toni once found him wading through the river, not far from the elm tree, and he punched her when she tried to coax him out of the water. Sarah was convinced the safest place for him was Sunny Haven and, reluctantly, she signed the necessary papers.

  Sarah makes her way up the stairs to her old bedroom at the end of the hall, the smallest room in the house. She recently remembered her father once stashing papers away in a little nook behind her bed when she was a child and she’s been wondering if there might be anything still left inside.

  The room is empty, except for the narrow metal bed frame. Strips of water-stained wallpaper droop from the walls and wire hangers lie strewn on the floor. Sarah pushes the rusting headboard away from the wall, revealing a panel held in place by a bent nail.

  Inside are two boxes; one is filled with chipped and faded plates wrapped in old issues of the Ross Prairie Review, and the other is full of musty invoices and yellowed tax returns bound with brittle rubber bands. She pushes them aside. Why would he save this junk?

  She is about to close the panel door when she notices a tin box, smaller than a shoe box, pushed up against the back wall. She pries off the lid and lifts out a chunky glass bottle with a pliable bulb the size of a young hen’s egg. The faint scent of rosewater wafts up when she squeezes it. There are also three King George VI half dollars, their faces worn smooth, and an ivory-handled brush with strands of black hair laced through the bristles. There are a half-dozen store-bought birthday cards and as many homemade ones. She opens a card with a drawing of a woman, the same size as the house and the trees, wearing a pink triangle dress. Someone, a teacher perhaps, printed Happy Mother’s Day inside and she added her own name. SARAH. She remembers making that card and is surprised her mother saved it. At the bottom of the box are a few pieces of rhinestone jewellery and a bright red ribbon her mother might have once used to tie up her hair. Finally, there is a small red notebook from the Farmer’s Co-operative with a picture of an antique tractor on the cover. The first yellowed page is filled with Cyrillic script, words like the ones etched on the oldest tombstones in St. Michael’s country church cemetery. On the next page, she recognizes her grandmother’s hand, the cautious, cramped way she printed For Fear, then more pages of indecipherable words. Further on are drawings of leaves — some serrated-edged, some oblong, others variegated or round — as well as sketches of dwarf bushes and gnarled tree bark and berries coloured in with wax crayon. There are notations for various ailments: gout, lady “trubbles,” colic. There is even a map with an X marking a spot along a winding creek with a large boulder and an arrow pointing to a trio of flat-topped mushrooms.

  Sarah smiles, remembering the way Baba kept the best mushroom-picking spots carefully guarded secrets. She flips another page, wondering why her mother saved Baba’s notebook along with the other unusual keepsakes. From what Baba told her, Sarah’s mother, Olivia, rejected Baba’s old ways and believed the faith-healing rituals and herbal remedies should have been left behind in the old country. She wanted no part of them. Why then, would she save the book?

  Sarah keeps flipping until, on the very last page, written in a different hand, she finds this: Save for Sarah. There is a rustling in the walls �
�� squirrels or mice — and Sarah shivers a little. Her mother wrote those words and it feels strange reading them, as if her mother is reaching out across time with a message for her. She wanted Sarah to have the little book.

  Tucking it back in the box, she takes the book with her, leaving the old house and its memories behind.

  The feud between the Bilyks and the Webbs started over the sale of Pete Tilley’s land. Being right next door, Eldon Webb had expected to buy it like he did much of the land that came up for sale, by outdoing the final bid. But Jack’s father, Anton, convinced Tilley to sell it to him without giving Eldon a chance to make an offer. He drove old Pete straight to the lawyer’s office to sign the papers before Eldon could get wind of it. Eldon was furious at being outsmarted by a Bilyk. Eldon once shot Anton’s dog, and there were other disputes over the years: wandering cows, toxic drift from a sprayer, tractor tires punctured by a set of overturned harrows left in Anton’s field. Not to mention all the trouble with Jack, later. Sarah doesn’t expect the news that Caroline is moving in to Sunny Haven to go over well with him, who still holds a grudge against Eldon Webb, long dead, and Caroline, too.

  When she gets home, Sarah drives through the farmyard to see if Jack is there. His truck isn’t parked by the workshop, but the overhead door is open and the MX tractor that was parked inside with the hood wide open that morning is gone. Anton is sitting at the front of the shop on an old wooden chair, sorting nails from a five-gallon pail into three dented coffee cans.

  She pulls up in her truck. “Hey, Anton. Is Jack around?”

  “No. Fixing fence. Doesn’t want no more dead calves. Jack thinks maybe it’s coyotes killing them, and it could be. Maybe even dogs. I told him about a pack that went crazy around here, years back. Chased down calves for the hell of it till they keeled over and died. Eldon Webb put an end to it, driving around, shooting every dog, including our Duke, whether they were guilty or not.”