Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [132]
The truck skids to a stop; there’s a rush of geese, the dogs barking. The door of the truck opens and Ron Sloane falls out. Staggers out, holding his arm. The tanned skin of his face looks like a brown paper bag, all the pinky-red gone out of it. “Where is she?” he says to Karen. He smells of sweat and fear. His sleeve is torn, his arm is dripping blood. Pouring blood, she sees now. The hurt, the danger comes off the arm in shock waves of brilliant red. Karen wants to scream, but she can’t, she can’t move. She calls to her grandmother inside her head, and her grandmother comes around the corner of the house carrying a pail, and sees the blood too and drops the pail. “God Almighty,” she says. “Ron.”
Ron Sloane turns his face to her and it is a look of abject, helpless appeal. “Fuckin’ baler,” is what he says.
Karen’s grandmother is hurrying towards him. “Boys and girls, boys and girls,” she says to the dogs and geese. “Cully, out,” and there is a barking, cackling retreat.
“It’ll be fine,” she says to Ron. She puts out her hand and touches him, touches his arm, and says something. What Karen sees is light, a blue glow coming out from her grandmother’s hand, and then it’s gone and the blood has stopped. “It’s done,” she says to Ron. “But you need to get to a hospital. All I can do is the blood. I’ll drive you, you’re not fit. That was a vein; it’ll start again in half an hour. Get a wet cloth,” she says to Karen. “A tea towel. Cold water.”
Karen sits in the back of her grandmother’s truck, with Glennie the dog. She always sits in the back now, if she can. The air whirls around her, her own hair ripples against her face, the trees blur by, it’s like flying. They go to the hospital, twenty miles away, in the same town as the train station, and Ron gets out, and then he has to sit and put his head down, and then Karen’s grandmother gets an arm around him and they hobble together into the hospital like people in a three-legged race. Karen and Glennie wait in the truck.
After a while her grandmother comes out. She says they’re leaving Ron Sloane at the hospital to get sewed up, and he will be all right now. They drive back to tell Mrs. Sloane what’s happened to Ron, so she won’t worry. They sit at Mrs. Sloane’s kitchen table and Karen’s grandmother has tea and Karen has a glass of lemonade, and Mrs. Sloane cries and says thank you, and the grandmother doesn’t say you’re welcome. She only nods, a little stiffly, and says, “Don’t thank me. It isn’t me does it.”
Mrs. Sloane has a fourteen-year-old daughter with pale hair, paler than Karen’s, and pink eyes, and skin devoid of colour. She passes a plate of store cookies, and stares and stares at Karen’s grandmother as if her pink eyes are about to fall out. Mrs. Sloane doesn’t like Karen’s grandmother, although she urges her to have more tea. Neither does the white-haired daughter. Instead they are afraid of her. Their fear is all around their bodies, little grey icy shivers, like wind blowing on a pond. They’re afraid and Karen isn’t; or not as much. She would like to touch blood too, she would like to be able to make it stop.
In the evenings, when it’s cooler, Karen and her grandmother visit the cemetery. It’s less than a mile away. At these times Karen’s grandmother puts on her dress, but Karen doesn’t have to.
They always walk, they never take the truck. They go along the gravel road beside the fences and the ditches and the dust-coated weeds, and Karen holds her grandmother’s hand. It’s the only time she does. She holds it in a new way now, feeling its stringy veins and its knobs of bone and the loose skin on it not as old but as a colour. The colour of light blue. It’s a hand with power.
The cemetery is small; the church beside it small too, and vacant. The people who used to be there have built a new church, a bigger one, out beside the main highway.
“That’s where we put the women and children, when the Fenians came,” says Karen’s grandmother. “Inside that very church.