Dance of the Happy Shades Read Free Page B

don’t believe me. I got the territory directly south of here.”
    “Walker Brothers? Is that a fact? You selling for Walker Brothers?”
    “Yes ma’am.”
    “We always heard you were raising foxes over Dungannon way.”
    “That’s what I was doing, but I kind of run out of luck in that business.”
    “So where’re you living? How long’ve you been out selling?”
    “We moved into Tuppertown. I been at it, oh, two, three months. It keeps the wolf from the door. Keeps him as far away as the back fence.”
    Nora laughs. “Well I guess you count yourself lucky to have the work. Isabel’s husband in Brantford, he was out of work the longest time. I thought if he didn’t find something soon I was going to have them all land in here to feed, and I tell you I was hardly looking forward to it. It’s all I can manage with me and Momma.”
    “Isabel married,” my father says. “Muriel married too?”
    “No, she’s teaching school out west. She hasn’t been home for five years. I guess she finds something better to do with her holidays. I would if I was her.” She gets some snapshots out of the table drawer and starts showing him. “That’s Isabel’s oldest boy, starting school. That’s the baby sitting in hercarriage. Isabel and her husband. Muriel. That’s her roommate with her. That’s a fellow she used to go around with, and his car. He was working in a bank out there. That’s her school, it has eight rooms. She teaches Grade Five.” My father shakes his head. “I can’t think of her any way but when she was going to school, so shy I used to pick her up on the road—I’d be on my way to see you—and she would not say one word, not even to agree it was a nice day.” “She’s got over that.”
    “Who are you talking about?” says the old lady.
    “Muriel. I said she’s got over being shy.”
    “She was here last summer.”
    “No Momma that was Isabel. Isabel and her family were here last summer. Muriel’s out west.”
    “I meant Isabel.”
    Shortly after this the old lady falls asleep, her head on the side, her mouth open. “Excuse her manners,” Nora says. “It’s old age.” She fixes an afghan over her mother and says we can all go into the front room where our talking won’t disturb her.
    “You two,” my father says. “Do you want to go outside and amuse yourselves?”
    Amuse ourselves how? Anyway I want to stay. The front room is more interesting than the kitchen, though barer. There is a gramophone and a pump organ and a picture on the wall of Mary, Jesus’ mother—I know that much—in shades of bright blue and pink with a spiked band of light around her head. I know that such pictures are found only in the homes of Roman Catholics and so Nora must be one. We have never known any Roman Catholics at all well, never well enough to visit in their houses. I think of what my grandmother and my Aunt Tena, over in Dungannon, used to always say to indicate that somebody was a Catholic.
So-and-so digs with the wrong foot
, they would say.
She digs with the wrong foot
. That was what they would say about Nora.
    Nora takes a bottle, half full, out of the top of the organ and pours some of what is in it into the two glasses that she and my father have emptied of the orange drink.
    “Keep it in case of sickness?” my father says.
    “Not on your life,” says Nora. “I’m never sick. I just keep it because I keep it. One bottle does me a fair time, though, because I don’t care for drinking alone. Here’s luck!” She and my father drink and I know what it is. Whisky. One of the things my mother has told me in our talks together is that my father never drinks whisky. But I see he does. He drinks whisky and he talks of people whose names I have never heard before. But after a while he turns to a familiar incident. He tells about the chamberpot that was emptied out the window. “Picture me there,” he says, “hollering my heartiest.
Oh, lady, it’s your Walker Brothers man,