LITMIR.BIZ

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small room at the back—Becker was working on a Kuskawa Cream Ale, and I was swigging Perrier. I’d explained my choice of beverage by saying that I was “cleaning out my system”, but the truth of it was that my body had rejected all forms of alcohol from the moment Becker’s wretched little drunken sperm buried its head in the pillowy wall of my private pickled egg. It’s as if every cell in me had immediately been put on High Alert by Head Office. “Attention all Polly-bits! We have a guest, whom you are all bound to treat with utmost courtesy. You shall desist at once from any unhealthy cravings. Lungs—we know you’re used to a shot of nicotine every fifteen minutes. Well, forget it. Gut—we know you’re trained to require a regular infusion of fermented material. Prepare for a new order. From now on, you’ll get milk and fizzy water, and you’ll bloody well like it.” The directive had nothing to do with me. And my sudden metabolic Puritanism played merry havoc with my mood, let me tell you.

      I blurted out my news while Becker was lining up a shot. It was an easy one—fourteen in the corner pocket—and it was already an inch away, set up perfectly so he could come back for the eleven. After I’d spoken, Becker’s cue sort of slipped sideways, the cue ball popped skywards and landed on top of the eight, smacking it squarely into the side pocket and ending the game in my favour.

      “Shit, Polly,” Becker said. “No fair—those are the kind of dirty tactics that can get you arrested.” He was laughing as he said it, reaching into his pocket for another loonie so we could play again.

      “That wasn’t a tactic,” I said.

      He went very, very still. “You’re kidding.”

      “Nope.”

      “You’re pregnant? You’re sure?” He was speaking carefully, now, moving towards me on tiptoe, as if I might be packing explosives.

      “Yes, Mark. Positive.”

      “And you’re positive you’re having it? You want it?” I appreciated that he didn’t knee-jerk all over me right away. I nodded, studying his face for signs of pleasure, pain, anger, elation—whatever. Signs of anything. He’d gone pale, and his expression was unreadable.

      He let out a breath, a sigh, and sat down beside me, not touching, but close enough that I could feel his body heat. “How long have you known?” he said.

      “Not long. It was that night we whooped it up at the Mooseview and took a taxi to your place afterwards.”

      I could see him doing the math. “That’s ten weeks, roughly,” he said. “Is there still time to do something about it, if you wanted to?” I wonder how many times, and in how many places, that same conversation has played out between two people. It conforms to the Trite-but-True rule. Life’s big moments don’t come wrapped in poetry and profound phrases. We humans are predictable. I had known damn well that Becker would be hurt beyond measure by the fact that I hadn’t told him right away. He was nobody’s fool, my policeman, and it had taken him less than a half a second to understand that I had made a decision already, without him. Maybe it would have been different if we’d been married. But we weren’t.

      “I think it’s legal up to about twenty weeks,” I said. “But it’s not an option I’m interested in.”

      “I didn’t think so.”

      “Is that what you want?”

      “Polly, did you make your decision to have this baby on the spur of the moment?”

      “Of course not! I thought long and hard about it—oh. I see what you mean. Sorry.”

      “Yeah. Well. Give me some time, okay? Do you want another game? You won when I scratched on the eight.” We played another couple of games that night. During the first one, Becker played hard. He missed dozens of shots by over-hitting them. On a small bar-table, you have to caress the cue ball, encourage the kiss of the spots and stripes and woo the gentle tock and click and thump that comes from the perfect angle. You can’t shoot good pool mad. He calmed down and concentrated after that, and it wasn’t until the drive home that he brought the subject up again.

      “This puts a new spin on the marriage question, doesn’t it?” he said. He had asked me to marry him back in August, just before we got distracted by our mutual involvement in a municipal corruption scandal. We arrived at some pretty clear answers in the scandal case, but the matrimonial issue was still open. I wore his ring on a chain around my neck, not on my finger, and I hadn’t given him an answer yet.

      “I guess it does,” I said.

      “You wouldn’t want to deal with a newborn in that cabin, Polly. You don’t even have running water.” That was the crux of the matter—the thing that was weighing on my mind far more than the unknown and alien things that were happening to my body. I live in a small, one-roomed building on the edge of a goat farm in rural Kuskawa. I’d moved there from the city to get away from noise and crowds and the corporate imperative, so I could pursue my craft, which happens to be puppet-making. I loved it there, and I didn’t want to move. Not for Becker’s sake, not for anybody’s, and certainly not for the sake of what in bleak moments I considered my personal parasite. It’s true there was no running water, but the well had performed its function perfectly for the five years of my residence. Granted, there was an outhouse, and it was a tad chilly in the dead of winter, but the pioneers had survived in spite of having to poop in an ice-house, and so had I. I didn’t need hydro—I had oil lamps and candles and never had to worry about whether or not I could pay the power bill. My lifestyle was perhaps unconventional, but it hadn’t done me any harm. In fact, I was far healthier living the way I did than I’d ever been in the city. I got lots of exercise, chopping wood and hauling water, I never caught colds, I ate vegetables grown right there on the farm, and in the dead of winter I kept my place at an even 16°C by running the woodstove at full bore. I wore lots of sweaters in the winter months, and in the summer I could wander around half-naked if I wanted to, provided the bugs weren’t too bad. We discussed these points in the Jeep, driving north through the October night.

      The downside to all my arguments, as Becker rather roughly pointed out when we got to the farm, was that pioneer babies, reared in circumstances similar to mine, often had a nasty habit of dying.

      The night was clear and cold, and there was no moon. We stood for a few minutes, looking up. There are times when that monstrous black expanse, splattered with stars like spilled Christmas glitter, is far too big and beautiful to be real. This was one of those times. Orion was beginning to creep into the sky—my favourite winter constellation—the big guy with his splayed legs and mighty sword. I’d always considered him the harbinger of comfort, of cosy evenings curled up in front of the fire with a hot toddy while a storm howls outside. Now he seemed threatening, his sword pointing to my cabin on the hill, reached by a path that would be thigh-deep in snow by mid-February. In February, I would be seven months pregnant. I would, I imagined, be heavy and perhaps bloaty, with thick ankles and shortness of breath. Would I able to strap on my snowshoes and haul groceries from the driveway of my landlord George’s farmhouse up to my place? Would I have the energy to chop wood for the fire and carry it inside?

      Now we come to a thing about me, which some people probably know already. If someone tells me I can’t do a thing, if they suggest that I would be an idiot even to think about it—well, I generally decide there and then to try. The alternative chilled me to the marrow. What? Knuckle under to the North American happy-baby dream of plastic cribs and Pampers and formula and washing machines and automatic everything, inside a hermetically sealed and overheated box with carpets and padded corners, baby-proofed and squeaky clean? Expose my child (there, I’d said it) to the poisonous influence of TV, the stinking breath of air conditioners and the banal subliminal coax of FM radio? No fear. I’d rather raise it in a tent.

      “Do you want to come in and say hello to Susan and George?” I said. My aunt Susan lived with George Hoito—the goat farmer whose cabin I rented—in the old brick farmhouse that had been there since the original homesteaders had got tired of roughing it in the cabin and perhaps losing babies down the well. Becker agreed to visit for a while, and we found Susan by the door with a “Did you tell him?” expression written across

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