Free Fever by Sharon Butala Page B

had belonged to the writer’s family.
    I had been warned about small towns: how they were hotbeds of gossip, innuendo and outright lies, of deep-seated prejudices and antiquated attitudes, also, of the most disgusting hidden vices. But some had told me of their warmth, and of the concern of villagers for each other’s welfare, of their appreciation of the past. What the people of the village thought of me didn’t matter to me; I didn’t expect to fit in, nor want to; I hoped only to find solitude and anonymity, to be better able to hold at bay all the temptations that accompanied fame, for I was sure they would ruin me as an artist.
    I want to be a writer. I murmured the incantation to myself over and over again. I want to be a
good
writer. And silently, sosilently that I never formed the words even in my own head, something in me murmured steadily, like the sound of the wind in the trees that lined the streets: I want to be a great writer.
    The woman from the neat new bungalow next door came to visit. I was at my typewriter when I heard the front door close and a woman’s voice calling, “Yoohoo,” down the hall. Startled, wondering if somebody had arrived without warning from the city, I hurried out to see who was there.
    A short, middle-aged woman in a print housedress, the kind my mother wore when I was a child, was advancing down the hall, peering to the left and right, holding a cake still in its pan in front of her.
    “Oh, there you are!” she said when she saw me. “I’ll just put this in the kitchen,” and disappeared into it. I followed. “Have you made a difference in here! That old Nick was so dirty! And when I tried to clean up for him, he got downright grabby, if you get my drift, so I had to leave him to stew in his own juice, if you know what I mean.” She set the cake on the counter, turned, and seeing me standing in the doorway, she said, “I’m Palma McCallum. I live next door. I thought it was high time I came over and introduced myself.”
    “George,” I began.
    “Barrett, I know,” she said. “You wrote that book. I read it,” she added, and went no further. She began to peel plastic wrap from the cake pan. “I didn’t mind it,” she said. “Heaven knows, there’s lots worse than that.”
    “Would you like some coffee?” I asked, deciding to ignore her remarks about my book.
    “Just the thing,” she said. “We’ll have some of my cake.”
    Palma had a husband, but I rarely saw him. He was always out at the farm seeding or summer fallowing or spraying or hauling wheat. I soon realized that she would be in my house everyday washing my dishes or dusting, if I didn’t make it clear to her that I wanted few interruptions. I was a bachelor, after all, and she assumed that I was like all the others in the district, a man whose socks always needed mending, whose buttons were perpetually popping off and needed sewing on and who would starve if it weren’t for the occasional casserole or pie fresh from her oven.
    “That rug needs vacuuming,” she’d say. “I’ll just run over it …” but I would quickly intervene, “Now Palma, I’m not helpless. I can vacuum my own rug. Come and have a cup of coffee with me. I was just going to take a break.” She would meekly follow me into the kitchen, checking behind me for dust on the windowsills, then sit while I made the coffee, chattering about her husband and her relatives and our other neighbours. Her sharp eyes took in everything, and I knew what she saw in the morning was all over town by afternoon. She kept bustling in without knocking until I took to turning the key in the door so that when she decided to drop in, she had to knock.
    I had quickly recovered the regime I had maintained before my first novel was released: up at six, write till ten, then out for a long walk across the river, over the prairie and up into the hills behind my house, then back to my desk. The pile of pages by my typewriter grew thicker with each day