Red Plaid Shirt

  Diane Schoemperlen

  Red

  Plaid

  Shirt

  stories

  new & selected

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Losing Ground (1976)

  This Town (1979)

  Frogs (1982)

  Hockey Night in Canada (1982)

  Clues (1984)

  Tickets to Spain (1985)

  A Simple Story (1987)

  The Man of My Dreams (1987)

  In a Dark Season (1988)

  Red Plaid Shirt (1988)

  Stranger Than Fiction (1988)

  Railroading or: Twelve Small Stories with the Word Train in the Title (1988)

  The Look of the Lightning, The Sound of the Birds (1989)

  Mastering Effective English (A Linguistic Fable) (1989)

  Nothing Happens(1990)

  A Change is as Good as a Rest (1990)

  The Antonyms of Fiction (1991)

  Weights and Measures (1993)

  Forms of Devotion (1994)

  How Deep is the River? (1996)

  Five Small Rooms (A Murder Mystery) (1996)

  Publishing History and Notes

  Permissions

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Losing Ground (1976)

  The photograph is black and white, printed on heavy cardboard. Two corners are chipped off like pieces of old paint. It is a picture of my grandfather sitting on a wagon in a field of grey grain. The wagon is pulled by two horses with hair like muffs around their ankles. One of the horses has its head down, one hoof extended. Its tail is caught flicking away flies, a small bird, the camera, and my ancestral eyes. The wind, which refuses to be photographed, is hung up in my grandfather’s hair. This makes him look young and careless.

  He was already in his eighties by the time I was born. Everyone called him Grandpa Blake and I never thought of him as having a first name.

  The photograph was taken on the family farm near Balder, Manitoba. Around the time I was born, the farm was sold to a group of Mennonites. This was when my grandfather moved into Aunt Clara’s house in Balder.

  In all the farm stories my mother told me, my grandfather figured as the patriarch, undisputed and self-proclaimed, a solid and sensible man. His father, my great-grandfather, was killed by the Indians when my grandfather was six days old. They threw his body in the creek and stole all the horses. I thought this was remarkable. My grandfather stayed on the farm for another eighty years and he never stopped working. At first my mother said she respected him. When I got older and he was dead, she told me that she’d hated him.

  He fathered twelve children, my mother was one of the younger ones. They all worked on the farm. The girls wore ankle-length dresses because my grandfather said showing your ankles was shameful. I imagine their skirts bunching up between their legs, the sweat trickling down their thighs, soaking through their cotton stockings. Hot prairie summer. Kerchiefs sliding down their wet foreheads, hair curling up in the sweat. Everybody wore work boots, brown lumberjack feet laced up with twine. Everybody knew what they were supposed to do. My mother figures she was born knowing how to milk the cows, bale the hay, and slop the pigs. She says, “It’s taken me fifty years to forget. Finally.” Sometimes now she speaks scornfully of people who are still farmers, working the land. She thinks they’re doing things the hard way.

  When the mares were bred with the stallion from the farm down the road, all the girls were kept inside the farmhouse. The blinds were drawn and the curtains were closed. They were also kept inside when the sow was giving birth and when Dolly, the old horse, had to be shot. All of these things, sex and birth and death, kept mixing up together. My mother thought they must be either extremely embarrassing or dangerous, something we must all be protected from. She and Aunt Clara can laugh about it now.

  I never lived in Balder. My parents and I lived in Carlisle, Ontario, but every summer we went west for three weeks.

  In Ontario, I was an only child and often lonely. We had no other relatives in Carlisle. But in Balder, I became part of a huge dangling tribe, there were dozens of them. Like my grandfather, the rest of the Blakes (except my mother, who’d married late in life) all seemed to be exceptionally fertile, their respective families like elongated arms stretching off in all directions. Those who didn’t live in Balder were always coming out to visit, or planning to, writing long letters to Aunt Clara which she read out loud to my mother and me when I brought them home from the post office. These other relatives were the main topic of conversation among the Balder relatives and so it seemed that we were all there together at once. The bunch of them were constantly engaged in a variety of emotional activities, all of them tangled up together, waving their arms, getting married, getting into trouble (for the males this meant Jail, for the females, Unwed Pregnancy) or heading for it, having babies, moving around the country, growing older, suffering mysterious, painful, and lingering illnesses. Back home in Ontario afterwards, I tried to keep hold of them but they always faded away. They were all much more believable in the summer.

  It took us one full day of driving to get from Carlisle to Balder. My father drove the whole way as my mother had never learned how. Her jobs were to light and put out his cigarettes, to pass him unwrapped sticks of Wrigley’s Spearmint gum, and to keep talking so he wouldn’t fall asleep. My job was to keep quiet and busy in the back seat. In aid of this end, my mother, for weeks before we left, bought a number of small items which I was not allowed to look at yet because they were for the trip. I thought this suspense was spectacular. The morning we left, these things appeared on the back seat in a brown paper bag which I was at last allowed to open once we were in the car, out of the driveway, and on our way. In the bag, there might be books, games you could play by yourself, sugary pink cologne in tiny bottles shaped like bells, cars, or birds, coloured pencils, notepads printed with kittens, my name, or pansies. The contents of the surprise bag kept changing as I grew older and then, I’m not sure when, it disappeared altogether.

  In Balder we always stayed at Aunt Clara’s house because she was my mother’s favourite sister and my mother hers. This was something they had discovered only after growing up, because Aunt Clara was fourteen years older and had left the farm to get married when my mother was only six years old. Aunt Clara was a widow now.

  There were about eight hundred people living in Balder then and the favourite joke around town was that half of them were widows. The men kept dying off and the women kept living on and on. There were old women everywhere you went. Very few of them remarried—there was nothing much left to choose from.

  In Balder everybody knew me. When I walked downtown to collect Aunt Clara’s mail at the post office, as I did every morning except Sunday every summer, people who passed me on the sidewalk smiled and said hello. Sometimes they called me by name and sometimes they said, “You must be Clara’s little niece from Ontario.” Some people drove by in their cars and waved. I waved back airily with Aunt Clara’s keys (the one to her post office box held apart so I wouldn’t get mixed up and embarrassed when I got there) as though I’d lived in Balder all my life.

  When I was walking with my mother, some woman would always stop and say to her, “Now which sister are you?” Everybody said you could tell a Blake girl a mile off and none of them ever got any older.

  More often though, I walked with my father. Sometimes we went out in the evening. We were closer then than we ever would be again. We had discovered how much alike we were and so didn’t talk much while we walked, just pointed out odd things to each other with no explanation. Occasionally someone would recognize him and say, “You must be Iris’s husband and is this her little girl?�
�� We were both hazily annoyed by this but we kept walking and never mentioned it. There was almost always heat lightning in the sky as it grew dark.

  Aunt Clara looked after my grandfather for ten years. No one ever questioned this arrangement. Aunt Clara was his oldest child: it was as though she had inherited him. When she decided to put him in the home in Winnipeg, half the family was upset and the other half said it was about time. Aunt Clara paid no particular attention to either faction. After ten years, it seemed, he was all hers: she could do whatever she wanted with him. She took care of all the necessary arrangements, packed up his few clothes in a brand new suitcase, put the suitcase in the trunk of her new Dodge, and drove him into the city herself. The black suit he was to be buried in was in the suitcase too.

  In a letter to my mother, she wrote, He’ll never come out of there alive. I took this to mean that there was little else he could be expected to do now except die. It was an unemotional issue. Most of his children were pragmatists.

  That Christmas my mother sent Aunt Clara the money to buy a new pair of drapes for the living room. Inside the card, which featured a fat red Santa Claus in pince-nez reading his list and checking it twice, she wrote, You’ll never get the tobacco smell out of those old ones. Putting the stamp on the front and two Christmas seals on the back, she turned to me and said fiercely, “When I’m too old to look after myself, I want to die. But if I don’t, you just put me in a home right off the bat. You don’t owe me anything!” For a few years, I thought this was both possible and true.

  When we went to visit him in the home, it was a special trip to the city. My mother, my father, Aunt Clara, myself, sometimes assorted cousins came too, we all went together, safety in numbers. I think they were still afraid of him. I neither dreaded nor looked forward to these trips. We usually went twice during the three weeks we spent in Balder. We drove the fifty miles to Winnipeg over easy-angled prairie backroads, watching the windshield sprout dust and dead bugs on the way. When I was younger, I counted Volkswagens and held my nose noisily whenever we passed a pig farm or a slough of dead water, curdling and thick around the edges like sour cream. When I got older, I drank warm Coke and read, sulky with impotent prepubescent anger at my mother because she had taken so long to get ready, saying, “I just have to put on my face before we go,” dressing up for him, checking out her colour coordination and her lipstick. As though going to a lot of trouble to do something you really didn’t want to do somehow made up for your reluctance.

  While all these preparations went on, I waited and pouted in the garden, stealing peas and poking around in the potato hills. This brought out the garter snakes, which looked greasy but felt dry when they brushed across my bare feet. I was afraid of them but pretended not to be because I knew it annoyed my mother.

  Sometimes, when I was feeling more generous, I waited on the front step, listening to the caragana seed pods bursting in the heat. The Mennonite boys drove by the house in their green pickup truck, right fender gone. There were five or six of them, they seemed to go everywhere as a group, spitting sunflower seed shells and laughing. They waved and hollered hello as they passed, which produced in me that minor secret hysteria all young girls are prone to.

  On the way out of town, we always stopped at Flint’s Family Store to buy a bag of peppermints for my grandfather. Flint’s was the sort of place that sold everything: food, clothes, shoes, jewellery, hand-tooled genuine made-in-Canada cowhide key cases, newsprint paper in bulky pads called giant, and salt licks. At first I thought these last were for people. They came in different colours: blue, green, an odd red that looked like half-cooked liver. I wanted to bend down and lick one, preferably a blue one, blue being my favourite colour, but once I knew they were for cows, I was afraid I would be poisoned on the spot and die a horrible death underneath the checkout counter.

  I rode in the back seat, my mother and Aunt Clara were both in the front, smiling and chatting and patting each other. They saw each other just this once a year and for three weeks they talked nonstop. After a week, they were saying the same things over and over again and nobody seemed to notice but me.

  My father was silent, driving in the heat, sweating and sighing. The road ahead of us glowed. By the time we got there, the car, which was black, was coated with white dust. My father always fussed about this and bought cans of Turtle Wax before we went home.

  The nursing home, called Paradise Retreat, was a flat, ochre-coloured building set down like a wafer in the middle of an asphalt parking lot. Once inside, we smiled as a group past the front desk matron. Past the first-floor cleaning lady, who was always smoking, never cleaning. She was leaning, rumpled and damp-looking, against the wall. Her cigarette, which was stuck to her lower lip, bobbed at us as we filed past. Her teeth were yellow, stuck into orange gums. She seemed to be flexing them when she smiled, which was frequently and unpredictably. Once I saw her coming through a doorway with her teeth in her hand and her fingers in her mouth, rooting around for stray bits of lunch.

  My grandfather’s room was at the far end of a long green hallway. Corner room, corner stone, I assume the family paid more for his corner lot. He shared the room with a man named Harold Clausen. In the room were two beds, identically tucked and folded. This precision allowed us to believe that he was being well taken care of. These people were professionals, no need to worry, no need to worry at all. My grandfather’s bed was covered with a grey blanket. There were bits of lint stuck to it and a zigzag line of blue stitching was coming unravelled around the edge.

  The window, there was only one, was over my grandfather’s bed. Once inside the room, I stood close to the door, too shy to move farther in. From the doorway, I couldn’t see out the window. I had no idea what you might or might not see through the net curtains.

  My grandfather was always there in the room when we arrived. He wouldn’t go down to the tv room with Harold because he couldn’t see well enough. But he wouldn’t admit this and he wouldn’t wear the bifocals they’d fitted him with. He and Harold were nearly always angry at each other for this or some other reason. Harold called my grandfather “the old man.”

  “Come to see the old man, did ya? Well, good luck,” Harold said. “Stubborn old goat hasn’t talked to me in a week. I put his glasses on him one night when he was asleep and he wore them all morning before he even noticed.” Harold thought this was a good one.

  My grandfather would be sitting on the side of his bed. His slippers were red plaid, sliced open across the toes to accommodate his bulging bunions. He wore a plaid flannel shirt and baggy green workpants held up by striped suspenders. He sucked peppermints two at a time from the bag we’d left him last time. The nurses doled out the mints so they’d last from one visit to the next. He was always accusing Harold of stealing them when he was asleep.

  Sometimes he figured out who we were and sometimes he didn’t. When he did, he always criticized my mother. “Iris, such a skimpy dress, can’t you afford to sew yourself a new one?”

  When he confused her with one of his other daughters, he said, “Where’s the boy with the curly blonde hair? Why didn’t you bring him along?”

  Once, eyeing my father, he said, “Who’s this you’ve got tagging along with you, Iris? Where’s Dan?” Dan was some phantom figure my grandfather nearly always asked about, but no one could ever identify him. We told him Dan was fine, just fine, hadn’t changed a bit.

  He had little to say to Aunt Clara and he never spoke directly to me. I just stood there by the door, chewing my fingernails, picking the scab on my knee, dabbing at the welling blood with a dirty Kleenex. He kept asking questions and my mother kept yelling answers into his ear, imagining that she could make him understand.

  The women’s ward was at the other end of the hallway. One of the women was called Old Mary. Sometimes she was docile and dim like the rest of them. Other times she rushed down the hall in her backless blue nightgown, screaming at random, at the walls, into open rooms, at her own feet. Her slippers wer
e made of yellow terry cloth, like bags sewn shut around her ankles. Her white hair was spurting out in chunks all over her head. She ignored the nurse trotting flat-footed down the hallway behind her.

  This nurse, whose name was Angela Carl, usually stopped by my grandfather’s room to say hello to us. She was short and pretty with pale red hair and pastel skin. She managed to look well dressed in her white nurse’s uniform. Her calves were thick and muscular and I imagined this came from chasing old people around.

  Angela Carl told me they’d taken Old Mary’s clothes away because she kept tearing them up and throwing them out the window or trying to flush them down the toilet. I had no idea whether Angela Carl thought this horrible or hilarious and no idea why she told me about it.

  The next summer Angela Carl told my mother that Old Mary had started wandering at night, too, sometimes crawling into bed with one of the old men. The night she tried to get into bed with Harold he pushed her out onto the floor. Harold was very proud of this and told us about it several times that summer, and the next one too.

  He said, “I can still take care of myself.”

  The other men were afraid of her and hollered for the night nurse to come and save them. Old Mary also stole bars of soap from everyone and hid them in the sheets at the foot of her bed.

  Aunt Clara said, “She’s gone mental, poor thing.”

  Going mental, I discovered, was something that could happen to anybody at any time. There was no cause and no cure. Some women went mental when they got pregnant too many times or too late in life. Some men went mental from drinking too much and then they tried to kill their wives with knives, axes, pitchforks, and other assorted implements. The wife was usually saved by some passing neighbour and then she was put under sedation and the husband was taken away after being successfully subdued by four burly men from the provincial hospital. Mental people were uncommonly strong.

  Some people who went mental died in the hospital. No one could tell me if these people died from being mental or from some other, less interesting disease.