1
In one day, six months ago, Louis Paradis became a husband and a farmer. He had the date engraved inside Maria’s wedding band, October 25 1950, and their names too, as if they’d ever forget what to call each other. On their wedding day, Maria’s father gave them the deed to a quarter section of land with a field, an old house, a barn, and six cows. Maria had been brought up on the farm and was overjoyed, but Louis didn’t know what to say. He’d been brought up in town and never even milked a cow. From then on it seemed to him as if he knew nothing and Maria knew everything.
It was the first warm day of spring and Louis was in Roger Couture’s farmyard. Roger was leaning against the bullpen. Thick wiry grey hair sprouted in patches from his skull and his skin was wrinkled and brown like a dried-up apple core. His square face was twitchy and showed something of the restlessness of the bull on the other side of the fence who was rubbing his massive flank against the boards. It was Maria who had arranged for him to fetch Roger’s stud bull for their cows.
“You ever handle a bull?”
A leather lead stretched from the top of the pole in his hand to a brass ring clipped in the bull’s nose. Louis shook his head no.
“Lucky for you his nose is tender.” Roger reached out and flicked Louis’s crotch. “Just like those.” He laughed. “You’ll be all right as long as you hold your arms up and keep the pole high. You want that lead tight so it pulls at the nose ring.”
Louis’s arms were shaking and he wasn’t even halfway across the field. There was a piece to go down the road yet and a creek to cross before he’d get the bull to his pasture. He didn’t dare lower his arms to rest even for a moment. He looked up past the length of the bull pole to the clouds blowing overhead. He’d tried to lower the pole just once and the bull had tossed his head to the side, almost wrenching it from his hands.
On their wedding day, Louis had worn a grey felt hat and Maria wore a gold chain with a cross that kept catching in the lace edging her dress. After the vows, standing together on the church steps, Maria had straightened his hat and Louis freed the cross. He never imagined that years later he’d give that hat to his boy or that he’d have to free the gold cross where it snagged itself on the lace trim of his daughter’s communion dress. But none of this was part of his married life yet.
It’s not that Louis didn’t have the imagination to think these thoughts. He had plenty of imagination. He had dreams of becoming a businessman like his father at the lumberyard in town only in a bigger and cleaner enterprise, a bank maybe or a government office. His mother, hoping he’d become a lawyer, had framed his high school graduation picture and hung it by the front door for everyone to see.
A roar came up from behind. The passing truck pulled up ahead, and a man leaned out the window. At first Louis thought it was Roger coming to check on him, but when he got closer he saw it was Henry Swanson.
“Couture’s bull going to take care of your cows?” Swanson was a heavy-set man with a pouchy face who lived in a new house in town, bigger even than the house Louis had grown up in. “I’m going to inspect my fields.” Swanson laughed. “Well, they’re not my fields anymore, not exactly anyway.”
Swanson had sold his fields to the government or a big agricultural company, no one knew for sure. What everyone did know was that there were crop experiments going on, that the new owners had hired Swanson, and that between the sale and the job Swanson had money enough to build the biggest house in town and buy a new truck outright. “Visitors are coming to see about the weed killers we’re testing,” he said. “Bigwigs from out East and the States too.”
Swanson led the way, driving slowly toward the far end of the field. Louis and the bull followed. Louis was thinking how Swanson could offer to hook the bull to the back of his truck. He could invite Louis into the cab and drive slowly until they reached the pasture while they talked, maybe about selling the farm, his and Maria’s. But before he could say any of it out loud Swanson sped up and, without even a wave good-bye, the truck dropped out of sight.
Louis kept thinking of Swanson’s big house in town and of Maria and their house on the farm with its peeling paint, cracks in the walls, frost inside the windows. He thought of their cold house and their life. The cows bawling before the sun comes up. The mud and manure he tracks into the house. Maria scrubs the floors on her hands and knees and at night tries to soothe her chapped hands with hand cream. Every day, morning and evening, there are cows to milk, pails and cans to scrub, milk to be hauled into town. In the morning he wakes up cold, afraid of what this life is doing to them. Not so long ago, he used to think about finding a job in town or in the city or even becoming a lawyer, but now he doesn’t know how he could ever make this life different than what it is.
When Louis and the bull reached the ditch running between the edge of the field and the road, the bull paused and glared at him, and then bunched his shoulders and leapt forward. Louis scrambled after him, down then up the banks of the ditch to the road where the bull had stopped suddenly, his head lolling from side to side. Louis forgot his aching arms and the fear that he wouldn’t be able to do anything that mattered in this life. He shook the pole and thrust it as high as he could.
“I’ve got you,” he shouted. “Do you hear me? I’ve got you!”
The bull tossed his head, then continued along the road as if nothing had happened. They had taken only a few steps when Louis heard the sound of an engine in the distance. A car slowed as it approached and then stopped. It was full of young men Louis had gone to school with, none of them married yet.
“Hey Lou,” the driver shouted, “let us give you a hand.”
“Count me out,” shouted a small man from the back seat of the car. Louis remembered how this small man used to sit in the back of the classroom and was always the first to speak up. “You wouldn’t catch me doing something like that. A bull can kill a man in a heartbeat. Chapeau, my man, chapeau.”
“I’m coming from Couture’s farm,” Louis said.
The small man whistled. “That’s miles away.”
“I’m almost home.” Louis couldn’t keep the pride out of his voice. Yes, he wanted to say, I’m married now. I have a wife. Soon I’ll have my own family. Sons and daughters too.
Before he could say anything more the car drove away, slowly at first then picking up speed and disappearing down the road. Alone with the bull Louis shook the pole in the air and shouted again. He didn’t have far to go now. The field was behind them and all they had to do was go up the road a way, then cross the creek into the yard.
In summer the creek dried up, but the runoff from the spring rain had changed it into a rushing stream. The bull went into the water up to its knees and stopped. He lifted his head and slowly swung it from side to side as if searching for something. Then he snorted once before going on again. When they got to the other side of the creek, Louis’s wet pants hung below his knees but he didn’t mind. He could see the yard and Maria in the garden leaning against a hoe. He waved the pole, shouting and leading the bull to her like a prize won in battle. Maria started to walk toward them, laughing and waving the hoe up high when, without warning, the bull tossed his head, ripped himself free, and, with the pole dragging behind, galloped toward her with Louis running behind, shouting and flapping his arms.
2
Maria walked the outline for their new house. The carpenter had staked out the layout for the foundation. Their dog trotted behind her. Louis was in the center of the layout studying the plans he’d rolled out on boards placed between a pair of sawhorses. He shifted the plans to orient them, the picture window of the living room looking east toward the field, their bedroom window, too, facing east.
“I want the sun on my face when I wake up. And when you come in from the barn, steps that go right to the basement so you can leave your boots and barn clothes down there instead of tracking muck inside. A bathroom with a shower in the basement and another one upstairs. A bedroom for us and one for Denis and another for Annette.”
Louis had been happy to let Maria talk.
After fifteen years of hard work and too many failed crops, the last few harvests had finally returned a profit. With a generous deal on the lumber from his father, it was enough to build a new house with good insulation and double-pane windows. Maria would never be cold again.
The house went up over the summer. In the evening the children swept the plywood floors clean while he and Maria examined the day’s progress. Maria often lingered in the living room area by the frame for the huge picture window that would look out on the field while the children ran through the unfinished house until Louis yelled at them to stop. They moved in at the end of September, the week after the crops were in. The following spring Louis took down the old house. By then Maria was settled in. At night, she sat in the living room stitching a petit point. She’d never hung any canvases or pictures in the old house but now she planned to hang the finished petit point pieces in the living room and the hallway.
The patterns were so detailed and the stitching so tiny Louis thought for sure she’d go blind, so he bought a special frame with a light attached to hold the canvas. She worked silently, lost in the country scene stretched on the frame, a curly-haired girl in a ribboned dress flirting with a young man and, leaping behind them, a bull with a garland of flowers wrapped around his horns. None of it was anything like real farm life.
“That doesn’t look like any bull I’ve ever seen,” he said.
Maria laughed. “You remember Couture’s bull? Lucky for me I was carrying that hoe. I whacked him good right on the nose. Otherwise I’d have been a goner.”
“Life would have been different,” Louis said.
“You would have left the farm,” Maria said.
In his mind what he’d said hadn’t sounded so serious.
Louis closed the copybook and shifted to stretch out his legs. The desk was too small for him. He was in one of the high school classrooms with four other people, all women and all younger. He had gone back to school and he didn’t care what people might think. The new English teacher, Miss Hood, had convinced the school board that schools in the city were running what they called “adult learning classes” so why not here in town? The class was held at night and any interested adult could sign up. It was a real class too if you needed to finish up your high school diploma.
Louis didn’t need a class to finish his degree—he had his diploma—but Maria had urged him to sign up. “You always liked school,” she said, but he knew what she was really thinking. It was getting harder and harder for him to get up for the morning milking and sometimes he couldn’t be bothered to scrub the pails after the evening milking. No one knew what was wrong with him and something had to be done. He’d gone to the local doctor then a doctor in the city, but neither of them could find anything wrong. The city doctor offered that sometimes men in their forties went through a slump and suggested he take it easy for a couple of weeks. “Tell that to the cows,” Louis said.
Miss Hood was talking about Lady Macbeth and her ambition. They were nearing the end of the course about Macbeth and his copybook was almost full of notes and ideas that came to him as he read the play and listened to Miss Hood talk.
“Do you think Macbeth would have killed the king on his own?” Miss Hood asked. “Or do you think his wife put the idea in his head and wouldn’t let it go? Was he a strong man who knew what he wanted or was he doing what his wife thought he should? Did he choose what was going to happen to him or did he follow what fate outlined for him? Think about what happened to Lady Macbeth. She lost her mind and killed herself. Why do you think Shakespeare made that happen? You can pick one of these ideas for your final paper or come up with an idea of your own. Come in next week with one paragraph about your paper.”
Louis decided to write his paper on fate and ambition. He sat at the kitchen table writing notes in his copybook. The more he wrote the more he thought about his own life. Had he talked to Maria about his dreams? Were dreams like ambition? And fate? Maria’s father had given them a field. He could have said no. Macbeth could have turned away from becoming king. He could have turned away from that fate. But Lady Macbeth made him accept his fate. He was afraid of his next thought. Had he accepted the farm as his fate because of Maria?
Did she have that power? He remembered that in the end Lady Macbeth goes mad.
Maria came up from behind and rested her chin on top of his head.
“Look at you doing homework. It’s like you’re that boy again carrying my books home after school.” Corny as it sounded now, her family lived on a farm a mile out of town and every afternoon after school he had walked her home. In the winter it would be dark by the time he arrived home. After a while his mother had stopped asking why he was coming back so late from school.
“What happens to Macbeth in the end?” Maria asked.
“He dies.” Louis turned to the end of the play. “‘I sink, I sink, — my soul is lost forever!’ Those are his last words.”
“And his wife?”
“She goes mad and dies too.”
“Jeez! You think they might have picked a more cheerful story.”
Louis crosses out his last paragraph and writes a new one.
Lady Macbeth did what she thought was right for her husband. She helped him accept his fate. If she had that much power, could she have helped turn him away from the fate that, in the end, took both their lives?
3
Maria pulled a thread through the petit point she’d just started, a desolate moonlit landscape in shades of moody blues. Louis was writing a letter to their daughter.
They were in the Tropical House of the Park Conservatory where Louis now worked the night shift. The Tropical House was a glass building, full of plants that seemed to have a life of their own. Thick vines climbed the walls up to the roof, large floppy leaves drooped overhead, and flowers with sharp petals of bright blues and oranges poked through their deep green foliage. The building was hot and humid and at night quiet and dimly lit. Louis imagined the plants were grateful for the quiet and the dark after being stared at all day by chattering crowds.
The night shift often felt long and lonely. When his boss suggested he bring Maria along from time to time, Louis was grateful. His own wife had always liked it, the boss said, especially in winter. Louis paused from the letter he was writing and looked up, as if to make sure Maria was still in front of him doing exactly what he had written.
You’ll never guess who’s sitting across from me. Your mother! She’s working on a petit point. Of course!
What else could he tell his daughter? That it isn’t easy to pick up a life and go, even if you know it’s what you’ve wanted all along. And if you wanted to take your house with you, not piece by piece, but all of one piece, that wasn’t easy either. Take it whole—that’s what they’d done. Maria had agreed to leave the farm on two conditions: she wouldn’t leave the house and she wouldn’t live in the city. From then on it was settled. When the job at the City Parks Department came through, Louis rented the fields to their neighbour, bought a lot on the outskirts of the city, and hired a mover to move the house.
Maria bought the petit point pattern before the move. She stored it in the linen closet and it didn’t shift at all, even when the movers shook the house loose from its foundation and jacked it up onto the flatbed truck. The mover had told her not to pack anything, except for the dishes. “Just tape the cabinets shut and you’re all done.”
Maria looked up from her petit point. “Is it always this hot and humid in here? I wonder why we didn’t do this earlier.”
Louis doesn’t know if she means the move from the farm or spending the night together at the Tropical House.
“Everything is controlled,” he said. “You see the gauge over there? It’s got to be a steady eighty-one degrees. If it’s not, all I need to do is adjust the main thermostat. You couldn’t do that on the farm.”
“On the farm, you never knew which end was up,” Maria said.
“I know. You were the farmer and I was always trying to catch up.”
“Is it any better here?” she said.
Louis was driving them home. Maria was huddled deep into her jacket, the fur rim of the hood hiding her face. She turned to the back seat to adjust the petit point she’d bundled into a clean towel. “I didn’t get as much done as I planned,” she said.
The sun was breaking through on the horizon, a sliver of pink and gold reflecting on the fresh snow. As they came up to the house, the old dog ran out to greet them.
“I don’t like that the dog runs up to the road like that,” Maria said. “He’s old and doesn’t hear or see much anymore.”
When the flatbed truck had come to haul the house away, the old dog ran off. Maria went on ahead with the house and Louis stayed back, waiting. He’d walked around the gaping hole. He could hardly believe how neatly and easily the house had cracked from its foundation. When the dog finally returned, they set off to meet Maria and the mover at the new lot. Louis drove to the end of the driveway then stopped the car. The dog was panting in the back seat, too excited to settle down. I’m finally leaving the farm, he thought. He felt like he should do or say something special to mark the moment but nothing came to mind so he kept going.
At the new lot, the mover walked around the house with them one last time. His men had finished securing the foundation and he was examining the placement and fit. This job had been easy even over the one hundred miles they had travelled. Starting out early Sunday morning, they had gone on back roads all the way and only had to stop once to let a tractor pull to the side and pass ahead.
“It looks good. Don’t be surprised if you see a crack or two on the inside or the outside as the house settles. That’s normal.”
“Is it safe to go in now?” Maria said.
“Sure. You can stay in it tonight if you want, though nothing is hooked up yet.”
Several months after the move, a crack did appear in the ceiling of the living room. Maria noticed it one morning after they returned from a night at the Tropical House. She told Louis and at first they worried about it even though the crack was small and thin. They could barely see it, really. But after some months of anxious looking, the crack didn’t seem to change at all so they forgot about it.
4
Maria has gone on ahead.
Their son had settled her into an old folk’s home in the wing with the cozy name Chez Nous while he had stayed in the city to finish up the sale of the house with the lawyers. He had walked through the empty house for the last time and wondered at the small crack in the ceiling that had come to nothing even after thirty years. The crack in Maria’s brain too had started small. Questions repeated once too often. Empty looks. A messy tangle at the back of a petit point canvas. He knew the crack had widened beyond repair when he found Maria sitting on the floor in the living room with a pair of scissors cutting the threads out of the canvases she’d worked on for years. Hours and hours of thread strewn all over the floor, as if the Fates had gone wild around her, cutting every thread she’d stitched to find the one that would finally release her.
It was best for everybody if they brought her back, Louis had said to his son, closer to the farm.
Louis swings into the driveway and pulls up next to the house their son has built on the old foundation. The farm belongs to him now and it seems to Louis that since Denis took over the yard is always busy. First one silo then another going up. An extra row of trees planted in the shelter belt. A new combine that almost drives itself. Louis thought how with time he had learned some things. He could tell if a field had been badly seeded or sprayed—too many weeds coming up above the crop. He could call out the name of a crop seen from the road. But he’d never been much good at farming, and everyone knew it. Maria knew it. Her relatives knew it. He didn’t have the head for it. Not like their son. Denis had his mother’s instinct and, what’s more, he thought about the farm, studied it like a book.
Denis leaned into the open car window and squeezed his father’s shoulder. “Do you want me to come with you?”
Louis shook his head, no.
A young woman leaves him at the door to Maria’s room. Her name tag reads Cartier. Louis thinks this might be the name of a boy who always sat at the back of the class. It could be her grandfather. Louis wants to ask but can’t remember the boy’s first name. He takes down the cutout of a maple leaf that’s pasted to the door, with Maria’s name written in big block letters.
Maria is sitting by the window. It’s the middle of the afternoon and the curtains are pulled open. The window looks out onto a field. In the distance a tractor circles. Her eyes are closed and there’s a soft look on her face. It’s the way she looked in the morning in the bedroom of the new house with the sun shining on her face. A muffled shout comes from down the hall then another. The room is warm and Maria seems to be asleep but suddenly she leans toward him.
“They’re ready,” she says.
“Who’s ready?”
“The cows, Louis.” She touches his arm lightly.
Louis feels dizzy. It’s been months since she’s called him by name.
“It’s time for you to get Couture’s bull,” she says.
Maria tilts her head and stares. Her eyes are clear and bright. She gives out a girlish laugh and their life rushes toward him—all of it and all at once moving backwards—until what’s left is a girl and a boy who takes the books from her hands to walk her home.
*
Learn more about Rachel on our Contributors’ Page.
Rachel’s latest book of poetry is The Book of Skeletons by Pedlar Press.
(Photo: Tim Vrtiska/flickr.com/ CC BY 2.0)
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