“Cheese curd?” she repeated.
“Cheese curd,” I shrugged.
She made me drive while she sat in the back of my car and spent most of the ride leaning out the window with a video camera in her hands. She needed the perspective of someone looking out the window of a moving car, looking up at clouds. They had to be the right clouds, she said. They had to line up in a certain way and cross a certain type of sky.
“That’s kind of a tall order,” I suggested, “considering the formation of the clouds and the sky is completely out of our control.”
“It’ll happen,” she said, “just keep driving. Don’t you have any faith, Sadie?”
“I do,” I said, and I did, but I lost it after two hours of zipping up one road and down another. Each one looked like the last, like all the roads that criss-cross the township, the landscape is surprisingly consistent. By car they appear as one long, liquid blur. The same watered-down images whir by, seen but not noticed. Only a house painted in an unlikely colour, or a particularly beautiful farm, or the shifting stones of a century-old cemetery provide visual breaks. Landmarks. And the odd hill, which is steep and distinct, instantly recognizable, and felt in the pit of your stomach as the road drops away beneath you.
“It’s the most important part of the documentary,” she pleaded when I suggested we go home, that the clouds weren’t listening. “Please,” she said. So I stayed out there and eventually passed a road, fleeting and familiar, while Del sighed and clung to the camera and rode with her head leaning out the window, restless and agitated, and increasingly desperate.
I could hear it in the way she breathed. As if it were a chore just to be there.
You can’t ride so close to the rails, to the nitty-gritty task of compilation — the putting-together of life stories, summation and conclusions, capsulated and abbreviated, told then walk back into your own life as Del was trying to do and live it as it comes at you, moment by slow-moving moment. Not without thinking of where it might lead, or won’t lead. Not without the taste of the earth, as it once moved from underneath your feet, appearing suddenly on the tip of your tongue, a mineral taste, distinctive and lasting, it takes days to go away. You can still feel it between your teeth. Your body shivers whenever you think about it, about where you once were.
The same can be said of a certain kind of love.
You can’t go there not there — and come back unchanged.
I returned to my husband — that night at the Legion, that night when I didn’t go off with Johnny Marks, I returned and I stayed. Partly because I felt I should, partly because Johnny never came to take me away. It was months before I finally stopped looking for him, half-expecting, half-hoping he’d come speeding up our driveway to get me.
I returned to Hal and to my garden and to cooking asparagus country pie. I filled two rooms upstairs, one with a son and then one with a daughter. Hal left before they ever started school — left me agitated and restless, with the taste of missed opportunity swimming around in my well-behaved mouth. I let him go without much fuss — told him I only wished he’d done it a few years earlier when I still had a chance with Johnny.
“That’s just it,” he said as she stood in our kitchen. “Now, I get to be someone’s Johnny.”
It ended without drama or raised voices. He just left one morning while the kids were out with my mother — with as much as he could carry at one time in his long, anxious arms. I watched him go. Peering out from behind the curtain on the front door, I watched him drive away, then I went for a walk.
I didn’t go very far. I walked along Sarles Road, not far from the road I lived on — a road no one lives on. A short stretch of side road with nothing but fields of hay, clover and straw, and fence lines held in place by high piles of fieldstone, some large and flat, perfect for garden paths. I’d taken my share over the years.
I kept thinking I should cry — not for the loss of a great love, for that would have been a lie. For what then? The loss a family? For my children’s father? Hal had promised to see them every other weekend and one night through the week.
No — if I had wept, which I didn’t, but if I had, it would surely have been for myself. For failing to trust what I knew years before, for failing to trust that Hal would have survived without me, for failing to see it wasn’t love for him that made me return, or pity, or duty, or anything like it. Pity and duty would have kept me from loving Johnny Marks.
It was on Sarles Road that I met the plaid patch, which sits on my left shoulder, next to my collar. My first patch. My first choice, the first time I realized I had any, that the world wouldn’t end when I made it.
His name was Zeke.
Yes, he had a last name, but I’ve thrown last names away in favour of the fabrics by which I’ve known them. Zeke Plaid and Glen Silk and Bobby “Ball Cap” Polyester. Shortcuts to the memorable moments in the life of Sadie McCann. Belittling details I admit trivialize and hide my fonder memories of these men with last names and snipped shirts and lives that go on without me, Sadie what-was-her-name?
Still, the shortcuts work and save me time. I think of Zeke Plaid and I instantly feel the overworked muscles underneath the flannel squares and the thick lines that only partially covered his heaving, hairless chest when he stopped shoveling gravel and asked me if I lived nearby.
“Around the bend, third house on the left.”
“The old Chalmers’ house.”
“You know it?”
“I’ve worked on these roads for fifteen years.”
“A lifetime for someone your age,” I said. He barely looked older than thirty and wasn’t sure if I was teasing him — I being the older — one the older woman who had to throw age up into the air, to see if it made any difference, if it made him run.
He didn’t bat an eye.
“In this job, you eventually meet up with everyone — or you hear about them.” It was his turn and he took it. Or you hear about them. Putting me in my place.
Zeke was an employee with the township. His dark blue pickup was parked nearby with the township emblem painted on the side of both doors. He was repairing Sarles Road that spring. It was only a matter of weeks between Hal’s leaving and my meeting Zeke. Hal left the first week in April. Zeke was working on Sarles Road in the middle of May. The heavy rains had washed part of it away, had thinned it out in places that threatened to split it in two.
I was on one of my walks, which I took whenever Hal had the kids, or my mother or my aunts came by to give me a break. It had become routine — counted on — this time to myself when I quickened my pace and lengthened my stride and walked from one end of the road to the other and back again, slowing down on the last few hundred feet, dragging out the minutes it would take to get home — back to the busy life that awaited me. Motherhood. A return to college. Stripping furniture at night and on weekends for a store in town to help pay the bills.
I walked down Sarles Road whenever I could, rain or shine. I practically ran out of the house to greet its knolls and potholes known to me as well as the scars and moles on a lover could ever be. Its trees and bushes and roadside boulders, and the one-wall remains of an old tree-house were as much a part of my walks as street signs and skyscrapers and store windows would be to any urban dweller — minus all human contact.
I never ran into anyone on Sarles Road. Not until the day I met up with Zeke.
He was bent over, a shovel in his hand, stopped in midmotion, looking up at me from underneath his Rawdon Township hat. Raindrops were