Surfacing - Margaret Atwood [15]
I go to the carrot row and pull up a carrot but they haven’t been thinned properly, it’s forked and stubby. I cut off the onion leaves and the carrot top and throw them on the compost heap, then put the things in the bowl and start back towards the gate, adding up the time, growing time, in my head. In the middle of June he was here surely, it can’t be longer than that.
Anna is outside the fence, she’s come to look for me. “Where’s the can?” she says. “I’m about to burst.”
I take her to the beginning of the trail and point her along it.
“Are you okay?” she says.
“Sure,” I say; the question surprises me.
“I’m sorry he wasn’t here,” she says mournfully, gazing at me out of her round green eyes as though it’s her grief, her catastrophe.
“It’s all right,” I tell her, comforting her, “just keep going along the path and you’ll find it, though it’s quite a distance,” I laugh, “don’t get lost.”
I carry the bowl down to the dock and wash the vegetables in the lake. Below me in the water there’s a leech, the good kind with red dots on the back, undulating along like a streamer held at one end and shaken. The bad kind is mottled grey and yellow. It was my brother who made up these moral distinctions, at some point he became obsessed with them, he must have picked them up from the war. There had to be a good kind and a bad kind of everything.
I cook the hamburgers and we eat and I wash the dishes in the chipped dishpan, Anna drying; then it’s almost dark. I lift the bedding out from the wall bench and make up our bed, Anna can do theirs. He must have been sleeping in the main room, on the sofa.
They aren’t used to going to bed as soon as it’s dark though, and neither am I any more. I’m afraid they’ll be bored because there’s no T.V. or anything, I search for entertainments. A box of dominoes, a deck of cards, those were under the folded blankets. There are a lot of paperbacks on the shelves in the bedrooms, detective novels mostly, recreational reading. Beside them are the technical books on trees and the other reference books, Edible Plants and Shoots, Tying the Dry Fly, The Common Mushrooms, Log Cabin Construction, A Field Guide to the Birds, Exploring Your Camera, he believed that with the proper guide books you could do everything yourself; and his cache of serious books: the King James Bible which he said he enjoyed for its literary qualities, a complete Robert Burns, Boswell’s Life, Thompson’s Seasons, selections from Goldsmith and Cowper. He admired what he called the eighteenth century rationalists: he thought of them as men who had avoided the corruptions of the Industrial Revolution and learned the secret of the golden mean, the balanced life, he was sure they all practised organic farming. It astounded me to discover much later, in fact my husband told me, that Burns was an alcoholic, Cowper a madman, Doctor Johnson a manic-depressive and Goldsmith a pauper. There was something wrong with Thompson also; “escapist” was the term he used. After that I liked them better, they weren’t paragons any more.
“I’ll light the lamp,” I say, “and we can read.”
But David says “Naaa, why read when you can do that in the city?” He’s twiddling the dial on his transistor radio; he can’t pick up anything but static and a wail that might be music, wavering in and out, and a tiny insect voice whispering in French. “Shit,” he says, “I wish I could get the scores.” He means baseball, he’s a fan.
“We could play bridge,” I say, but no one wants to.
After a while David says “Well children, time