we come to a thing about me, which some people probably know already. If someone tells me I can’t do a thing, if they suggest that I would be an idiot even to think about it—well, I generally decide there and then to try. The alternative chilled me to the marrow. What? Knuckle under to the North American happy-baby dream of plastic cribs and Pampers and formula and washing machines and automatic everything, inside a hermetically sealed and overheated box with carpets and padded corners, baby-proofed and squeaky clean? Expose my child (there, I’d said it) to the poisonous influence of TV, the stinking breath of air conditioners and the banal subliminal coax of FM radio? No fear. I’d rather raise it in a tent.
“Do you want to come in and say hello to Susan and George?” I said. My aunt Susan lived with George Hoito—the goat farmer whose cabin I rented—in the old brick farmhouse that had been there since the original homesteaders had got tired of roughing it in the cabin and perhaps losing babies down the well. Becker agreed to visit for a while, and we found Susan by the door with a “Did you tell him?” expression written across her face in bold.
“I know about it,” Becker said right away, thereby banishing any chance of a pleasant, uncomplicated chat. Within moments, Becker and Susan had launched into a gang-up-on-Polly session that lasted well over an hour. Becker wanted me to move into his condo in town and gestate in comfort and convenience. Susan, who knew me well enough to know that threats and pleading would fall on ever-more-stubborn ears, simply suggested that if the toils of winter at the cabin got to be a bit too much, I might consider moving in with them for the final month or two. George, who sat and smoked his pipe (in defiance of Susan, who told him it was not good for the baby), listened and watched me very closely.
“Polly will do what she pleases,” he said towards the end. “You know this is true, both of you, and while your alliance is encouraging, you will not be able to change her mind.” Susan and Becker had never really liked each other—Susan had an instinctive distrust of policemen, born of her activist history. To Susan, civil disobedience was a duty, not merely an option, and she had been arrested more than once in her youth. Becker said she made him uncomfortable. Aunt Susan was as close to a mother as I had—my parents having been killed in a car crash when I was ten. She could be fierce in my defense, could Susan, and although Becker had risen in her estimation after she was told that he wanted to marry me (rather than merely toying with my affections, as she called it), she was still perplexed as to why we were attracted to one another in the first place. Most of my friends seemed to wonder about that, actually.
Becker had by then, I suppose, cemented his position regarding the baby. Susan had worked him up into a froth of righteous indignation, which is not his best party-piece. If I wanted to have the baby, he said, he wasn’t about to be un-supportive. After all, he was the father. (Not “after all, I love you”, but then he would never say such a thing out loud in the presence of George and Susan. Heck, he still hadn’t managed to say that out loud in the presence of me.)
“I love being a father,” he said, referring to Bryan, his eight-year-old son from his first marriage, who lived with his ex-wife in Calgary. “And I’m willing to give our child everything I have, Polly. We’ll talk about this some more—soon, I hope, but I hope in the meantime you’ll think about someone other than yourself for once.” He kissed me before he left and told me he’d take me out to lunch in a day or two. But that didn’t happen, because the next day he received a phone call from his ex-wife, telling him to get his butt on a plane because his father (who lived in Calgary, too) had had a heart attack. I didn’t see him again for three weeks, by which time I was picking names and thinking about how much winter firewood I would need to keep my growing belly warm.
Two
Pregnant women who continue to smoke cannabis are probably at increased risk of giving birth to low birth weight babies, and perhaps of shortening their period of gestation.
-From Big Bertha’s Total Baby Guide
One of the big chores in the spring, if you’re a wood-burning person who doesn’t want to pay $85 a cord, is to go out in the bush and cut it yourself. If you’ve really got it together, you’ll already have a year-old supply drying in your woodshed while you’re cutting the next. If you’re me, you meet up every spring with a local guy called Ethan, promise him a half-share of what you take together and then hope for a good drying summer, because you’ll be burning it in six months’ time.
My winter’s wood was still lurking in the middle of George’s west acreage, where Ethan and I had stacked it in April. (George had said “take what you want—there is more than enough for us all.” He cut his own in the valley, closer to the farmhouse.) Aunt Susan suggested that I might want to order my winter fuel from the Tucker brothers (“Wood R Us”) and have them deliver it, to save me having to haul my own out of the bush.
“I’ll help pay for it, Polly,” she said, “if the cost is what concerns you.” But it wasn’t the price, it was the principle of the thing. Anyway, I told her, there’s no way the Tuckers’ truck, an enormous diesel monstrosity that belched black smoke and weighed several tons, could make it up the steep, narrow footpath that led to my cabin. While the prospect of driving George’s tractor into the bush and loading up the ancient, wheeled wood-cart a dozen times didn’t exactly thrill me (it never did), I figured the exercise would be good for me.
Eddie showed up to help, which was kind of him, although I suspect he might have been given some unavoidable incentive for doing so by Susan, his guardian. Eddie was eighteen by then—a big lad, whose early years had been peculiar and difficult. His mother lived in a psychiatric facility in North Bay, and his father was out of touch, living in sin somewhere in the States with a Biblical literalist. After his home was broken, Susan invited him to stay with her, and she mothered him the way she did me—without the silent “s” at the beginning of the word.
Eddie arrived as I was preparing to load the cart for the second time. My dogs were snerfling around in the undergrowth, which had taken a hard frost the night before and probably smelled wonderful. It was the frost that got me off my duff and into winter-wood-mode. I’d had a fire going for a couple of days already, using some leftovers from last year, but I knew that the demon bailiffs of procrastination were hovering nearby, polishing up their collecting jars and laying bets about the weather. It hadn’t snowed yet, but it would soon.
“It’s me, Polly,” Eddie called, as Lug-nut announced his approach with a gentle, “familiar-two-legs-at-nine-o’clock” kind of bark. Luggy is the senior dog in our pack, a sturdy male mongrel with yellow eyes and a shaggy coat like a bad wig. Rosencrantz, a yellow Lab puppy with more pedigree than wit, looked up in surprise. When she saw Eddie, she made up for not hearing him earlier by firing off a long series of high-pitched, yappy sounds.
“Rosie! That’s enough!” I sounded a tad hysterical, even to myself. Eddie pretended he hadn’t noticed. It occurred to me suddenly that, by winter’s end, I would be coping with a whole new spectrum of unnerving, high-pitched noises, human ones, and shouting back wouldn’t be allowed.
“Susan said to follow the sound of the tractor,” he said. “But I heard the engine stop as I was coming up the hill. Is it stalling out again?”
“It’s running fine,” I said. “I just don’t see the point in running it when I’m not using it. It stinks, and it’s noisy.”
“Yup,” Eddie said, grinning. “Like a baby, right?”
“Smartass.” That was far too astute for an eighteen-year-old, in my opinion.
“No, really, I know about the noise part because we’re doing the Ready or Not Tot unit in Family Studies right now,”
