Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [13]
And there he was with his dirty black clothes flapping in the heat, his hair all wild and strange about his head. He wears a hat of some kind, shredded and filthy and pushed to the back of his skull.
His cheeks, high up under his eyes, are brown and wrinkled as walnuts. The long eroded lines of his face are seamed with dirt, either that or it’s the queer foreign tint of his skin.
His horse, poor creature, stands by the roadway, tied to the little bent aspen by the side of Mercy Goodwill’s door. Trust him to tie up carelessly like that when he might have chosen the fencepost just as well. And that wagon, all broken down and shabby, so that it hardly deserved to be called a wagon, the way it rattles, and creaks as it jerks along its way, scattering the very crows in the fields.
His arrival is everywhere dreaded, for almost invariably he asks for the refreshment of coffee or a swallow of cold water, and then there are the cups and glassware to be scalded after him. Traveling in winter, in the remote countryside around Arborg where the Icelanders have settled, he often dares to beg a roof for the night.
Bedding, then, will have to be produced, and boiled the next day, and the windows opened wide for airing. He carries into those clean, frugal households the stink of garlic, onions, mildew, and unwashed skin. The buttons and bootlaces and needles he sells, though hard to come by, are scant compensation for the risk of bedbugs and vicious unnamed diseases. His tongue is thick and sour, his eyes bewildered. He wheedles. He addresses every woman in the region as "meesus," their husbands as "meester." To the young men in the boarding houses he sells filth. He might be forty years of age or sixty. He carries a selection of pills and lotions, pocket knives and small toys, tobacco and hard candy, all poison.
He looks no person in the eye. It’s said he helps himself to fresh eggs from the hen houses, pinches tomatoes from gardens, slips teaspoons under his coat and carries them off. He reaches forth a black hand and pats young children on the head, catching them before they can run away, discomfiting their mothers and fathers.
He can be seen on back roads putting a whip to that poor nag of his. He shuffles up to doorways and knocks in a way that is obsequious and yet demanding. You hear that knock and you know who it is. His gait is damaged, a slow uneven shuffle that calls up memories of old-world contagion. Yet here he is on a July afternoon, running raggedly toward Mrs. Clarentine Flett, who stands beside her clothesline—her banner of bedsheets and towels—like a figure burned into a wood panel.
He grabs first at the sleeve of her dress. Instinctively she pulls away, gasping, protesting, but of course he grabs again, this time catching her roughly by the wrist. His face is screwed up with sorrow, and he’s sobbing, wailing, "Meesus, meesus," his face so close to hers she can smell the rankness of his breath and body.
"Come, meesus; meesus, come."
The voice is demented; it has the creak of terror in it, too highpitched for a man’s voice, and the words nothing but gibberish. He has no more than three teeth in his head—she registers this with something like awe. A sore blackens his upper lip. Clarentine Flett, pulling herself away from him, feeling faint with disgust, is unable to take her eyes from that dried scab, which she unaccountably longs to reach out and touch.
He refuses to let go.
"Come, meesus."
She is made queasy by the roughness of his hand on her wrist, but the sight of his thready coat sleeve, and the way his pale arm shoots out beyond its length, gives her pause.
It is an ordinary man’s arm, Mrs. Flett observes, and it is only mildly grotesque, not that different really from her husband Magnus’s arm as it slips free of its underwear casing on a Saturday night and plunges into the scum of soapy water—exposed, scarred, knotted with veins, tightened with exertion, yet surprisingly, touchingly, womanlike.
She wonders—and all these images of hers crowd together