House of Spells by Robert Pepper-Smith Page B

table to check through before leaving.
    “I’ve given that up,” she said. “I’ve another job.” And in my astonished silence, she added, “Cleaning rooms in the Mackenzie Hotel.”
    I’d never seen her smile like that. She looked wide-awake, as if she’d just come from a swim in the lake. She was making herself a bag lunch, slicing bread and laying lettuce and sliced tomatoes and shredded ham on it, her hands light and quick. She took a couple of apples out of the refrigerator and a handful of raisins. These she put in a paper bag and she took a thermos of tea.
    In her old job, she never had time to make food to take with her. When the call came, she would just get up, check the contents of her bag and go. Usually the family would feed her. Now she had time to sit and drink coffee before she went to work. She got up early, to sit at the kitchen table and listen to the awakening birds. Sometimes, she told me, she even read a newspaper or listened to the radio. There was no hurry, no emergency.
    She called her new job — cleaning toilets, she said: “I clean toilets in the Mackenzie Hotel”— the work of nonemergencies. She had no disasters to anticipate. No one was turning to her, full of pain, with a look that said, You’re the only one here who knows what to do. Do something.
    Lunch bag in hand, she said Mr. Giacomo had called to ask me to meet him by the river.
    “He wants you to show him where to fish,” she said. “For the parish supper.”

    On the Palliser banks, he asked me, “Do you think we’ll have any luck?”
    I said I didn’t know.
    We left the shore in his boat. I knew the deep pools under the bridge, where the sturgeon sleep like old dogs.
    I remembered how he’d tried to touch my knee on the train and how my body had drawn away from him without even thinking. I didn’t feel that I was myself around him anymore. It slowly settled in me that I was afraid of him. His smile was calm and inviting, the friendliest thing about him, but it made me afraid.
    The metal line he let out had thread woven over it the colour of the shadows that flowed along the river bottom. The tip of his fishing rod was as thick as his thumb. The river was littered with alder leaves, so many coloured with a blue bloom, like ripe plums.
    I counted eight boats on the sturgeon pool under the bridge. Every year at this time the village fished the river. By agreement only one sturgeon was taken, and it was offered to the priest.
    “Since the death of our boy,” he said, “my wife and me are like old people.” He laughed. “We must look like we’re cut out of cardboard! I believe people here see us that way,” touching the corners of his eyes. When he looked at me his eyes were full of shame.
    “Mrs. Giacomo hasn’t left her room for weeks. Do you think Rose is going to keep her child? It must be so hard for her.”
    His face showed the same quiet patience that I’d seen on the train.
    The sky had settled over the river and already a few flakes were falling; almost like night the way the light had faded, the snow beginning to cling to the sandbar. The jacket he handed me smelled of wood smoke, of the campfires the village had lit on the sandbar while we fished for the new priest and of the gasoline he’d poured into the outboard motor tank. He draped the jacket over my knees with raw hands touched by the cold, his knuckles swollen. He was massaging his knuckles and I wanted to give him my mitts but he said no, he was fine.
    “Of course she’s going to keep the baby,” I said then. I’d put on a look of complete confidence. “Your helping her isn’t going to make any difference.”
    For a while he looked at me quietly. “Well that’s it, then,” he said. “I guess there’s nothing more I can do.”
    He looked at me again and in his eyes there were still flashes of hope. “Rose has changed her mind before,” he said. “Maybe she’ll change it again.”
    In the stern at his feet there were paper