Faster than a speeding pile of frozen molasses. How’s the veggie garden?”
“It has been a good growing season,” George said. “Too good. There is too much, almost. Tomatoes, zucchini—the zucchini is taking over. I should not have planted it so close to the onions.”
“The zucchini was Susan’s idea, wasn’t it?”
George looked at me a bit sadly. “Yes, it was her idea. A good one, Polly. I just put in too many seeds, that’s all.” What he meant was “stop being so critical of your aunt,” and he was right, but somehow I couldn’t help it. Once you start down the blame road, it’s hard to stop.
“Well, you’ll have lots of zucchini bread and frozen zucchini for the winter, anyway,” I said.
“Do you need any tomatoes? Let me give you some.”
“That would be great,” I said, and we spent a pleasant few minutes wandering in the jungle of George’s garden, filling a basket with warm tomatoes, ripe almost a month before their usual time, a couple of fat ears of corn and some green beans. I had spent a few frustrating seasons trying to make a vegetable garden of my own up at the cabin, but finally gave up after the deer, rabbits and groundhogs made it clear that anything planted so close to the forest belonged to them, not me.
“I’ll come down on the weekend and do a little weeding in here,” I said. Wild vines, the bane of every Kuskawa garden, were starting to get a stranglehold on the corn and beans.
“No need,” George said. “Eddie and his girlfriend are going to do that on Sunday.”
“Oh.” I should have been glad that Eddie was making such an effort to be useful, what with doing the barn chores and all, but I couldn’t help feeling redundant. The veggie basket on my arm grew a little heavier—yet another favour I wouldn’t be allowed to return.
I borrowed George’s little red wagon to haul my beer, a few other purchases and the veggies up to the cabin. I had a couple of hours to kill before Susan’s Social Justice meeting, and I didn’t want to stick around at the farm long enough to be invited for dinner. I wanted to sulk, and that’s best done alone.
When I got home, I cracked a Kuskawa Cream and rolled a small joint, smoking it on the porch and watching the tendrils of blue smoke curl up in a spiral overhead. I’m not a heavy dope-smoker, you understand. Just the occasional puff for recreational purposes. The previous year, when I’d met Mark Becker, and we’d given in to a ferocious mutual chemical attraction, I’d ruined it by offering him a post-coital joint. Not the brightest move in the world, considering that he’s a policeman who takes his job seriously. He’d gone ballistic, threatened to arrest me, and it had taken a long time to patch it up. Now we worked according to that U.S. military dictum: Don’t ask, don’t tell. I never smoke around him, and I confine my indulgence to the times when I’m certain not to be seeing him. He still looks steadily into my eyes whenever we meet, though, to see if I’m under the influence of narcotic substances. Not a very comfortable state of affairs, but it was the best we could do.
As usual, the dope lubricated the creative cogs, and I went back inside to do some more work on the Kountry Pantree sketches. Rosencrantz was asleep on her favourite chair, curled up into a unbearably cute ball of fuzzy puppyness, her tail wrapped around her nose. I wanted to gather her up and nuzzle her, but it wouldn’t have been fair to wake her up unless I was willing to put in some dog-time. One must let sleeping puppies lie.
I am a firm believer in developing tactile relationships with companion animals. I regularly get close up and sniff the various composite parts of Lug-nut and Rosie to make sure they’re clean and healthy. (This is not as disgusting as you might imagine, folks.) They let me examine their teeth and ears, massage their fuzzy necks, bellies and paws, clip their nails and do all those rather intimate things that responsible dog owners must do for their pets from time to time, and I like to think that their tolerance of such behaviour is because they’re used to it. Mother/Alpha dog and all that. They like to lick my legs after I have a bath, too, but that’s probably way more information than you need. It grosses Becker out, which is not surprising. Not only do I avoid smoking dope around him, I also try to remember not to stick my schnozz into Luggy’s ears when he’s around. I don’t doubt I’ll end up one of those eccentric old hermits who leaves all her worldly possessions to her dogs.
I pulled the library books out of my “I Brake For Frogs” book bag and turned to the top-quality chapter on cows I’d found in Farm Animals Explained. Not that I really needed to know about the four stomachs of a bovine ruminant, but if you’re going to build a costume that looks like a cow, you have to have some idea of how the common cow is put together. Goats I knew back to front and sideways, but my experience with cows was limited.
An hour or so later, I had a fairly respectable sketch of Kountry Kow, complete with apron, udder and a cunning tail that, if the cow mascot made the final cut, would swish, thanks to a secret wire inside.
I slugged back a cup of elderly coffee, washed my face in a basin of rainwater and headed down to be grilled by Susan and her Social Justice League.
George’s driveway was crowded with vehicles, several of them bearing store logos. A purple mini-van announced that “Emma’s Posies (45 Main Street E.) are Bloomin’ Lovely.” A boxy, boat-shaped sedan had “Downtown Drugs: Your Family Drugstore” written on the door, and I guessed that the yellow Camry belonged to the owner of the Laingford photo shop, because it had a huge plastic camera mounted on its roof.
As soon as I arrived, I realized I’d neglected one of the first rules of etiquette which govern rural meetings at somebody’s home. You’re supposed to bring food. I came in the back door leading into the kitchen, to find Susan bustling around making coffee, surrounded by plastic-wrapped plates of goodies. There was a platter of small cakes, a mound of little triangular sandwiches, some miniature pizzas and a box of After Eight mints with a gift bow on the top.
“Somebody having a birthday party?” I said to hide my embarrassment. I should have whipped up a batch of granola bars or something, I thought to myself, except for the fact that it was too warm for me to have the woodstove going, which would have been the only way to bake them. Luggy, smelling food, threw himself to the floor and grovelled at Susan’s feet. Rosie, who generally copied everything he did, followed suit.
“I’d forgotten that people always come with offerings,” Susan said. “We’ll never get through this lot. You’ll have to take some back with you, Polly.” She halved one of the sandwiches, made the dogs sit, then handed the pieces over. I’d finally given up asking my aunt not to spoil them. I wasn’t about to give her grand-nieces or nephews, after all. The dogs knew better than to try the begging routine with me.
“Maybe I should have a meeting of my own,” I said. “I’d never have to buy groceries again.”
“If you want to live on sugar-laden squares and white-bread sandwiches, go for it,” she said. “You go in and introduce yourself. We’re still waiting for a couple of people. I’ll be there in a moment. Oh, wait. You can take this with you.” She handed me a tray of coffee-things, which I manoeuvred through the door into George’s living room. The dogs stayed in the kitchen with the goddess of food.
Sitting beside George on the sofa was Pete Somebody, who ran Pizza Madness, next door to the Gazette office. I’d bought a slice from him often enough to know who he was, though we didn’t exactly run in the same social circles. I’d seen him coming out of Kelso’s, Laingford’s West End girlie-bar, enough times to figure him for a regular. He nodded at me, then turned back to George, whose ear he was obviously bending. George puffed
