One
Howie’s got a backhoe, Howie dug a hole.
It’s big enough for Daisy
and he didn't tell a soul.
—Shepherd’s Pie
When one of George's goats dies, he just crams the corpse in a feed sack and takes it to the dump. It’s no problem as long as it’s a weekday when Spit Morton is working. Spit wouldn’t care if you dumped nuclear waste in the “wood only” pit as long as you were quiet about it.
Freddy, the other guy who works at the dump on weekends, is the one you have to watch out for. He comes up to your truck as soon as you drive in.
“What’cha got?” he’ll say. I guess you could lie if you wanted to, but Freddy has an instinct, like an OPP officer running a spot check. He would smell your lie and he is perfectly capable of wrenching the bags open with those big red hands of his and pawing through your shame. I would never lie to Freddy. Neither would George, which is why we saved the dead goat for Monday morning.
George is older than he looks, tall and spare with hair the colour of a larch in late autumn—a sort of yellowy-orange, which he wears long. He is my landlord, a Finn with charming manners and the strength of an ox. He farms a couple of hundred acres of northern Ontario soil, rocks mostly. Every spring a fresh crop of boulders heaved up by the frost pokes through the melting snow, ready to take the edge off the disc harrow. We collect them and haul them off to the edge of the hay field, where we will one day build a wall with them.
I am the hired hand. Three years ago, I came up here to Cedar Falls from Toronto to rent George’s old homestead cabin for the summer. I had put the word out that I needed a place to work, a quiet, out of the way hovel somewhere, and I heard about George’s place through my aunt Susan, who runs the feed store in Laingford.
She called me the day before the lease ran out on my awful little basement apartment on Broadview Avenue.
“Got a place for you,” was the first thing she said.
“Susan? That you?”
“No, it’s Jim Henson.” I’m a puppet-maker by trade, and the joke wasn’t funny. Henson created the muppets and was sort of a god to me. When he died, the world got a little bit darker.
“Har, har. Kermit is watching you, Susan. What kind of place?”
“A shack in the woods. Right up your alley. No plumbing. Rent’s cheap. Expect you on Friday.” She hung up. She’d always hated the phone and carried on a running battle with Ma Bell, refusing to pay the phone bill until the last possible moment, then writing out the cheque and leaving a few cents off the payable account, just to piss them off. Getting a phone call from her was something of a miracle. I borrowed a truck the same day and headed north.
Dweezil had died of asthma, George said. He was a breeding buck who had suffered through six winters of wheezing and coughing, dying slowly from a ridiculous, tragic allergy to hay.
As a child I had buried my fair share of gerbils, budgies and kittens, but although I was fond of Dweezil, I wasn’t about to build a cardboard headstone for him. Besides, he was way too big to put in a shoebox.
When we found Dweezil, stiff and silent in his pen, on Sunday evening, we simply shook our heads and bagged him, ready for the next morning when Spit Morton would be manning the dump. After the chores were done, we each went our separate ways, agreeing to meet at dawn to do the deed.
George’s old cabin, the original homestead building on his farm, is the perfect place for someone like me. I’m broke most of the time, and I’m a slob. Because of what I do for a living, I can’t afford much rent and I need lots of space. I do sell the puppets I make, occasionally. My specialty is marionettes, but I have been known to accept commissions for foamconstructed, muppety-things.
I had just completed a set of Audrey-the-Plant puppets for a Toronto production of Little Shop of Horrors when Susan called about the cabin, but I was up north for a week before the contact-cement headache went away.
The contrast between the Broadview basement apartment, crammed with foam rubber, Kraft dinner boxes and beer bottles, versus George’s airy cabin, my new home, was breathtaking.
The cabin was primitive, but there was a woodstove, an outhouse, a well and privacy. Everything that mattered. I wasn’t just escaping the city to work in solitude, actually. I was also on the run from an unwise affair with a narcissistic actor who had been pressuring me to move in with him. I didn’t leave a forwarding address, and he would never have followed me up here anyway because there is no television, no phone, and only one small mirror in the bedroom.
George didn’t like me at first. I have a feeling I was mildly obnoxious for the first few months—I wanted to do everything myself and I wasn’t very gracious about accepting help. Later, though, we found a balance. I started helping out with the goats and I let him teach me how to chop wood properly after I almost cut my foot off. Now we’re buddies, and I get to live on his land for free.
When we got to the dump on Monday morning we had poor old Dweezil wrapped up in his feed sack and buried discreetly under a stack of rotting timber in the back of George’s pickup.
Spit Morton was sitting asleep at the wheel of his hearse, in which he lives.
Nobody knows where Spit goes on weekends when Freddy’s working. Maybe he drives out onto a back road somewhere and parks, waiting for Monday. I have rarely seen him get out of the hearse, which is a two-tone pastel monster, like a bad pantsuit. It’s dented and rusted, but it still has the original sheer curtains masking the back windows.
Rumour has it that Spit’s Dad, Laingford’s undertaker, had groomed both his sons to take over the business when he died. At the funeral, Spit and his brother rolled dice to see who was going to be boss. Spit lost, so he decked his brother out cold on top of the casket and stole the hearse. Hunter Morton never tried to get it back.
I guess if you’re going to live in a vehicle, a hearse is a pretty good choice. There’s probably even a bed back there somewhere, although nobody I know has ever had the pleasure of finding out.
Spit chews tobacco, which slows down his conversation a bit. He doesn’t say much, until you get him going.
My first chat with him was in the early days when I thought he was like Freddy, requiring me to ask permission and perhaps pay him off before carting anything away. I had my eye on a dented but serviceable zinc tub in the “metal only” pile, right next to a stack of crushed bicycles and an old fridge. I was willing to pay a price for it.
“Hello there!” I said. He spat and looked at me from the cab of the hearse.
“Do you have any problem with me taking that old tub over there?”
He spat again and his eyes followed my pointing finger. The hearse was parked ten metres or so away from the metal pile. Without a word, he started up the engine, which purred with so little noise it was uncanny. I suppose that hearse manufacturers make that a specialty—you don’t want revving engines when you’re in mourning. He got into gear and whispered it over to the tub. I ran to catch up.
“What do you think?” I said, panting.
