The Freedom in American Songs Read Free Page B

of the men observed.
    â€œYes. Lots of bargains down there.”
    â€œHow’s Tom’s place? That old roof hasn’t fallen in on you yet? Marion, isn’t it?”
    â€œMarianne, yes.”
    â€œWell girl, if you need a few shingles nailed on, give us a call.”
    â€œThanks.”
    â€œRemember that, now. Don’t be a stranger.”
    Hens pecked around his boots. A soot-black rooster with a scarlet comb strutted resplendent in the snow. Farther up the hill glowed the dormant flame tree. It made Marianne think of the burning bush page in her new calendar. Snow had settled in white fingers over the fingers of the roadside spruce and fir, an endless pattern of shapes like hands; white snow-fingers settled against dark spruce and fir fingers; hands on hands—the trees’ only chance to be caressed all over—how they must love it.
    The headlands had turned white and reflected beams of white light on the calm sea. All the fence posts were edged in a soft white layer like icing, and whiteness filled the air. Everything was still. She came up over the hilltop and stopped in the road.
    My smoke is white .
    Her fire, burning in her absence with Ezekiel’s birch and her dry kindling, rose thick and pure white, into the cove’s own whiteness. Her smoke had never done this. Now hers was no different from her neighbours’. As thick as the smoke of the Silvers next door was hers, which until today had made a pathetic trail next to the Silvers’ thick, proud plume.
    Her gloves’ fingers were full of bits of shell and bone. It was hard to hold Mrs. Ruby’s shopping bag. She knew exactly where to hang her new calendar: the same place Mrs. Ruby hung hers, up over the woodstove looking down on the kitchen. She headed for home and her underwear drawer where she kept her two-inch nails and a small hammer, and marvelled at this day that had decided to let her in, when it could have lowered the latch on its gull-white door and quietly turned her away.
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    The Christmas Room
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    â€œCome down,” Mrs. Halloran begged Marianne, “and give me a hand with my wallpaper.” A rule of the cove was that you had to redo all your walls before Christmas, either with a new coat of paint from Lundrigans or with wallpaper.
    This would be the second Christmas since Mrs. Halloran’s husband Leonard had died. He’d lifted one end of a two-by-four to be sawn for the new McDonalds in St. John’s, and he’d had a massive heart attack. Marianne, sitting on her picnic table playing her guitar, saw the priest get out of a maroon limousine. He was not the local priest but came from down the shore. He looked like a skeleton. Mrs. Halloran had been baking three lemon meringue pies, and they burnt black.
    â€œI was going to bring you up a bit,” she’d told Marianne, “but now I don’t know when I’ll ever get to bake them again. I may never bake another lemon pie. I made them for him. He loved them.” The following October Marianne had come from a walk to the pond and found a wedge of lemon pie quivering on her kitchen table.
    But these days Mrs. Halloran wore her blue sweater with rust-coloured stripes and blotches of paint on its elbows. Every day she put on her black pants that had grown patches of knobbles. She no longer combed her hair except when she went to mass and bingo, and her perm stood in little periscopes that had corners instead of curls. There were pieces of wallpaper caught in it now. Leaning against the couch, amid scraps and curls of wallpaper, was a garbage bag full of Christmas presents.
    Even after two years here, Marianne was not sure how Mary and Margaret and Mary-Margaret and the other old women of the cove viewed Mrs. Halloran, but she had an idea that Mrs. Halloran lived differently from the others, and that it had something to do with ambition and money and maybe pride. Nothing