Free Maclean by Allan Donaldson Page B

over to the right beside the ditch, watching for the first glimpse, if there was to be one, of Mitch’s half-ton truck. The wonderful lightness of the early part of the afternoon had been driven away, leaving behind it something half way between drunkenness and hung-over sobriety. As he came up to the house beside Alice’s, he saw that Mitch’s parking spot was empty, and he swung out into the middle of the road and began to walk as best he could like a man drawn along by nothing more than a casual, summer-afternoon fancy for a little stroll.
    Alice’s house sat sideways to the road and consisted mostly of afterthoughts. When Mitch bought it, fifteen years before, it was just a bungalow, but as their brood of kids grew Mitch pushed out rooms this way and that and finally added to the original structure a second-storey with an almost flat roof which had to be shoveled all winter to keep it from collapsing.
    Maclean crossed into the yard on a culvert of old railroad ties and made his way around to the back of the house. He mounted the steps to the kitchen door and peeked in through the screen. Alice had become a little deaf and hadn’t heard him arrive. She was standing with her back to the door cooking doughnuts in a great pot of boiling fat on a black woodstove. There were pans and bowls everywhere, a cookie sheet with ginger snaps, a pan of johnnie cake, an uncooked pie.
    Alice had undergone a succession of transfigurations since Maclean had gone off to the war. When he first came back, she was still a good-looking woman, not much different from the good-looking woman he had last seen when he left. Then after she had had six children, she became gaunt and worn and looked more like fifty years old than thirty-five. Then some years later, some female thing happened inside her, and she had ballooned in a couple of years to her present size and come to look the fifty she now was, only a different kind of fifty.
    She was wearing an old, flowered, short-sleeve print dress, hoisted up higher in the back than in the front by her hips and streaked with sweat under the armpits and down the middle of the back. Her arms and legs were fat and white, her legs were pebbled with varicose veins, her hair was graying and thinning, hanging as straight and slack as a bunch of strings.
    Maclean tapped on the screen door, first gently, then a little harder.
    Alice looked back over her shoulder, and he caught the look of surprise, then, unmistakably, of aggravation as she recognized him. He thought of saying ‘hello’ and then leaving, but he found himself already opening the door, taking off his cap, and stepping inside into the heat and the rich smell of frying doughnuts.
    â€œI was just going by out here on the road,” he said, “and I thought I’d look in for a minute. I didn’t get you at a very good time.”
    â€œI can’t stop these now,” she shouted, all flustered. “Once I got them started, I can’t stop.”
    â€œNo, no,” he said. “I can see that. Don’t you trouble.”
    He fidgeted uncertainly at the door, wondering if he should go away after all, while Alice went on dropping in doughnuts, turning them, fishing them out, not looking at him, her movements abrupt and awkward.
    â€œYou gonna sit down?” she asked finally.
    â€œWell,” he said, “just for a few minutes maybe, then I’ve got to be going.”
    He edged past her, his cap in his hand, and sat in a chair by the window, where she could see him to talk to while she worked.
    She leaned forward and stared at him.
    â€œWhat have you done to your face?” she asked. “You ain’t been in a fight?”
    â€œI don’t know,” he said. “Something wrong?”
    He got up and looked at himself in the mirror over the sink. There was a bruise, black and blue, on the side of his forehead where he had hit it when he fell at the Black Rock, and a scratch down