Payments are due on the fifteenth. Her voice is ash. The flashing on the roof
needs replacing. There’s ninety-one dollars in the dresser.
Mother.
Shhh, Tomcat, she hisses. Don’t get yourself worked up.
***
Tom manages two more payments. Then the bank comes for the house. He
walks in a daze through blowing sleet to the end of the lane and turns right and
staggers through the dry weeds till he finds the old path and walks beneath the
creaking pitch pines to Ruby’s marsh. Ice has interlocked in the shallows, but
the water in the centre is as dark as molten pewter.
He stands there a long time. Into the gathering darkness he says, I’m still here,
but where are you? His blood sloshes to and fro, and snow gathers in his
eyelashes, and three ducks come spiralling out of the night and land silently on
the water.
The next morning he walks past the padlocked gate of International Salt with
fourteen dollars in his pocket. He rides the trackless trolley downtown for a
nickel and gets off on Washington Boulevard. Between the buildings the sun
comes up the colour of steel, and Tom raises his face to it but feels no warmth
at all. He passes catatonic drunks squatting on upturned crates, motionless as
statues, and storefront after storefront of empty windows. In a diner a goitrous
waitress brings him a cup of coffee with little shining disks of fat floating on top.
The streets are filled with faces, dull and wan, lean and hungry; none belong to
Ruby. He drinks a second cup of coffee and eats a plate of eggs and toast. A
woman emerges from a doorway and flings a pan out onto the sidewalk, and
the wash water flashes in the light a moment before falling. In an alley a mule
lies on its side, asleep or dead. Eventually the waitress says, You moving in?
and Tom goes out. He walks slowly toward the address he’s copied and
recopied onto a sheet of Mother’s writing paper. Frozen furrows of ploughed
snow are shored up against the buildings, and the little golden windows high
above seem miles away.
It’s a boarding house. Mr. Weems is at a lopsided table playing dominoes by
himself. He looks up, says, Holy shit sure as gravity, and spills his tea.
***
By a miracle Mr. Weems has a grandniece who manages the owl shift in the
maternity ward at City General. Maternity is on the fourth floor. In the elevator
Tom cannot tell if he is ascending or descending. The niece looks him up and
down and checks his eyes and tongue for fever and hires him on the spot. World
goes to hades but babies still get born, she says, and issues him white coveralls.
Rainy nights are the busiest. Full moons and holidays are tied for second. God
forbid a rainy holiday with a full moon. Ten hours a night, six nights a week, Tom
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