Spit Delaney's Island Read Free

what
they’d done with Old Number One.
    Sold her to the National Museum in Ottawa.
    For tourists to gawk at.
    Sons of bitches. They might as well have lopped off half his brain. Why
didn’t they sell the government his right arm too while they were at it?
    The hundred-and-thirty-ton diesel-electric they offered was no consolation. “A dummy could run that rig!” he shouted. “It takes a man to put
life into Old Number One!”
    He ought to be glad, they told him. That shay was long past her usefulness, the world had changed, the alternative was the junkyard. You can’t
expect things to last for ever.
    But this was one uncoupling that would not be soon forgiven.
    First he hired a painter to come into the mill and do a four-foot oil of
her, to hang over the fireplace. And unscrewed the big silver 1 from the
nose to hang on the bedroom door. And bought himself a good-quality
portable recorder to get the locomotive’s sounds immortalized on tape.
While there was some small comfort in knowing the old girl at least wasn’t
headed for the scrapyard, it was no easy thing when he had to bring her
out on that last day, sandblasted and repainted a gleaming black, to be
taken apart and shipped off in a boxcar. But at least he knew that while
strangers four thousand miles away were staring at her, static and soundless as a stuffed grizzly, he would be able to sit back, close his eyes, and let
the sounds of her soul shake through him full-blast just whenever he felt
like it.
    Stella allowed him to move her Tom Thomson print to the side wall to
make room for the new painting; she permitted him to hang the big number 1 on the bedroom door; but she forbade him to play his tape when she
was in the house. Enough is enough, she said. Wives who only had infidelity to worry about didn’t know how lucky they were.
    She was president of her Lodge, and knew more than she could ever
tell of the things women had to put up with.
    â€œInfidelity?” he said. It had never occurred to him. He rolled his eyes
to show it was something he was tempted to think about, now that she’d
brought it up, then kissed the top of her head to show he was joking.
    â€œA woman my age,” she said, “starts to ask what has she got and where
is she headed.”
    â€œWhat you need is some fun out of life,” he said, and gathered the family together. How did a world tour sound?
    It sounded silly, they said.
    It sounded like a waste of good money.
    Good money or bad, he said, who’d been the one to go out and earn it?
Him and Old Number One, that’s who. Hadn’t he got up at four o’clock
every damn morning to get the old girl fired up, and probably earned more
overtime that way than anybody else on this island? Well, was there a better way to spend that money than taking his family to Europe at least?
    They left her mother behind to keep an eye on the house. An old woman who had gone on past movement and caring and even speech, she
could spend the time primly waiting in an armchair, her face in the only
expression she seemed to have left: dark brows lowered in a scowl, eyes
bulging as if in behind them she was planning to push until they popped
out and rolled on the floor. Watching was the one thing she did well, she
looked as if she were trying with the sheer force of those eyes to make
things stay put. With her in the house it was safe to leave everything behind.
    If they thought he’d left Old Number One behind him, however, if they
thought he’d abandoned his brooding, they were very much mistaken; but
they got all the way through Spain and Italy and Greece before they found
it out. They might have suspected if they’d been more observant; they
might have noticed the preoccupied, desperate look in his eyes. But they
were in Egypt before that desperation became intense enough to risk discovery.
    They were with a group of tourists, standing in desert, looking at a
pyramid. Cora whined