It was Donna-Lou Dermott, dressed like a chicken.
“Well, hey, girls, don’t you just looove Hallowe’en?” she said. She carried a wicker basket full of eggs—her own—(well, the ones from her hens, I should say) and was apparently on her delivery route. Her chicken suit was remarkably inventive. She’d wrapped herself in some kind of quilt batting and then she must have gone at it with a pair of scissors and a hairbrush, producing a tufted, feathery kind of toga. She wore an orange, cardboard beak on a piece of elastic, like an oxygen mask, pulling it down to speak so it hung like a wattle under her chin. Her face was painted bright yellow, and she wore a pair of yellow rubber gloves.
“I just ran this up on my Singer last night,” she said, “and I can’t tell you how many compliments I’ve had today.”
“Fowl and fair,” Ruth said, which only made Donna-Lou blink a bit.
“It’s nice to see you, Ruthie. Are you still writing your songs?” Donna-Lou said.
Ruth, who hasn’t been called Ruthie since high school, smiled gently, which is more than I would have managed. Shepherd’s Pie does about as well as any other popular Canadian folk band these days, which is to say that they’ve been profiled in Saturday Night and Maclean’s magazines, have won some Juno Awards and occasionally get some airplay on the CBC. “Ruthie” was a fairly big name in certain circles, but not, I guess, in Donna-Lou’s.
“Yep, still doing my thing,” Ruth answered. “Nice to see you, too, Donna-Lou. You still in the egg business?”
“Well, I should hope so,” she said, affronted. Her feathers sort of ruffled, and I took note, thinking I would give quilt batting a try as puppet-hair. It seemed to have a kinetic life of its own. “Somebody’s gotta keep food on the table,” Donna-Lou went on. “Otis decided to seed the back field with hemp this summer past, and got a good crop, too, but the government confisticated it for some reason, just before harvest, so we didn’t make no profit at all.”
I resisted the urge to correct her grammar. “Hemp? You sure it was the legal kind?” I said.
“Well, Otis said it was, but I kinda wonder about that, now. He didn’t get arrested or nothing, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Of course not, Donna-Lou.” I hadn’t seen anything in the Laingford Gazette about it, and if it had truly been marijuana in Otis Dermott’s field, you could be sure that the local press would have given it front page priority. On the other hand, maybe it had been the real stuff, and the government had snagged it and was storing it in the same place they stored the stuff they had grown themselves, in that government-sanctioned grow operation in a mine somewhere in Manitoba. Canadian lawmakers are kind of two-faced about the issue, having legalized the drug’s use for those who require it for medicinal purposes. They set up a highly efficient grow operation underground, a kind of hi-tech hydroponics farm, and rumour had it that the stuff they produced was so powerful, they were afraid to make it available to those who needed it. My theory was that they were stockpiling the stuff against the day when they finally legalized it and would start selling it at the provincial liquor and beer stores. “A six pack of Molson’s Ex and a pack of Doobies, please.” I can hardly wait.
“So, how’s the mother-to-be?” Donna-Lou said. “I see you’re porking up a bit already. That’s good, dear, but you mustn’t let your weight get away from you, or you’ll never be able to lose it after.” She reached out a rubber gloved hand and pinched my upper arm, like she was testing bread dough. I felt a growl start deep in my throat, unbidden and menacing. Donna-Lou sensed it and backed off. Chickens are naturally wary of dogs, they say, especially Rottweilers.
“Well, anyway—here you go—and Happy Hallowe’en,” she said, handing each of us a couple of foil-wrapped chocolate eggs before scuttling away.
“Left over from Easter, I’d wager,” Ruth said, poking at hers. “Celebration overlap.”
“Hey—chocolate is chocolate,” I said, unwrapping mine with undignified speed and popping it into my mouth. “A little stale, but perfectly palatable.”
Ruth’s eyes followed the retreating form of the chicken-lady as it disappeared into the canned vegetable section. “You know, forget the witches and ghosties and ghoulies—that has got to be the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Mmm-phmn,” I said, still chewing.
Rico and Brent lived in an apartment directly over Rico’s store, the Tiquery, and it was stuffed with pieces he couldn’t bear to part with, or perhaps simply couldn’t sell. There were two ponderous Victorian sideboards in polished veneer, a fat horse hair chesterfield with carved wooden lion’s feet, and dozens of those little occasional tables designed to feature one crocheted doily, a china shepherdess and not much else. For the party, Rico had put away the china figurines, and the little tables were cluttered with bowls full of munchies instead. I found myself grazing mindlessly, like my bovine cousins, stuffing candy corn, potato chips and chocolate-covered pretzels indiscriminately into my mouth.
If you have any more sugar, my girl, you’ll be bouncing off the walls in a minute, I heard my mother’s voice whisper in my inner ear. Oddly, my maternal ghost was not talking to me but was rather having a severe word with my Sprog, my private dolphin, who probably was experiencing a bit of a sugar high. Still, as far as I could determine from what Dr. Cass Wright had told me, the fetus, at thirteen weeks, was quite incapable of doing any wall-bouncing just yet. At this stage, the child would be about three inches long and weigh almost an ounce. She would have eyelids, fingernails and toenails, and a bit of spontaneous movement, but not enough to be breaking ornaments or pulling down pots of hot water on herself. Or himself, I guess, but if the ghost of my dead mother had chosen this moment, after more than twenty years of silence, to tune in from the ether, and had chosen to address my progeny as if it were female, then that was that. I had no doubt she knew her stuff. My mother had never, in my ten years of having known her, been wrong.
“It’s a girl, I think,” I muttered to Ruth, as we mixed up a couple of caesars in the kitchen—a virgin version for me and a hefty, vodka laced one for her.
“Do you want it to be?” she asked.
“Heck no, I just want it to be healthy,” I said in a sickly sweet parody voice, the kind that you hear on television commercials for disposable diapers. Theresa Morgan was with us, decked out in full witch regalia (she belongs to a coven that meets regularly at a spot by the rapids in Cedar Falls). Theresa used to be my Aunt Susan’s shop assistant at her co-op feed store and had recently taken the place over when Susan sold it. She was in the process of turning it into a vegetarian café, which we all hoped would be successful. The feed store had run into trouble after an American chain called Agri-Am opened up an enormous franchise a couple of doors down and undercut the co-op’s prices, luring all her business away. Theresa figured that nobody was likely to open a big-box veggie café in Laingford any time soon, so this was a relatively safe venture.
She had dropped in just for a while, as she was presiding over the Samhain ritual that year. Theresa wasn’t wearing a pointy hat, I might add, and didn’t carry a broom. She was dressed in a dark, flowing robe, with interesting symbols embroidered in silver around the waistline and hem, and her neck was festooned with things on strings—crystals and wooden ankhs and a sturdy silver half-moon. I had been invited to come along, but I’m not big on rituals of any description, having had my fill of that kind of stuff as a child-Catholic.
“You sound a little sarcastic, Polly,”
