The House Guest

I’m writing this at the downstairs desk where I do homework.  It’s the same desk Bridgie used to come up and stand behind sometimes. After a second or so, I would feel her standing there. Then I would turn around, making it slow because she’s a kid you don’t want to scare. She has big dark blue eyes, red hair about the color of the sun before it’s really up. She doesn’t have much of a chin; her cheekbones are high and like smooth little rocks under the clear skin. She’s no beauty. I mean she’s just what she is.

When I turned around, she was there as I’d thought. I would say, “Can I help you, Bridgie?” she would shake her head; she’d just wanted to see if I was alright. And when she’d made sure I was, she would just turn around and walk off. My mother and father told me she did the same thing with them: stood and looked at them for a couple seconds, then just walked off… satisfied they were still themselves and handy.

She was only with us for six short weeks. It was one of those red-tape deals through the United States government: you signed up to keep a kid from North Ireland in your home as a guest. The idea was to show the kids what the United States was like. As if anybody could even do that in six years. Anyhow, I was all for it; my brother is an intern and he’s working in Rome for a year, and I never had a sister.

The night Bridgie first came, after my parents brought her from the city, to our town, she didn’t talk much at all. I don’t mean she ducked her head or looked awkward or fiddled with her feet behind the furniture. It was just that she clammed up.

She had a small green bag with some extra clothes in it and an old doll that had been whacked around quite a bit. That was the whole works, except for the clothes she wore. Next day my mother took her to a couple of shops in town and bought her some new stuff. She still wasn’t talking a lot, only pleases and thank-yous, and when my mother took the new clothes out of the boxes to hang them up, Bridgie touched them, very politely as if they belonged to somebody else and shouldn’t make any fuss. She was nine years old.

At first it kept on being kind of eggshelly around her. You see, we weren’t supposed to ask her anything deep about how things were in the place she’d come from. She’d been born in Belfast, grew up there. She had four brothers and two sisters. She was next to oldest. Her mother died a year and a half before and her father took care of the family the best he could. We got that from a bunch of statistics that came before we even saw her. The people running this show wanted kids to “fit easily into the American environment.” Without being bothered. I guess that was a noble idea, but it left an awful lot you couldn’t say or ask.

You can hear a good deal of traffic from our dining room, not anything thunderous, but back fires and people pretending they were race car drivers when they zoom down the street. And a couple of times at dinner, when this happened you could see Bridgie stiffen up. She’d get quiet as a rabbit, and it wasn’t even so much as the way she looked out of the corner of her eyes. As if she were searching for a neat, dark place to hide in.

It didn’t wreck her appetite, though. I don’t mean she was born a pig, I just mean she always eats fast and never left anything on her plate. Oh, sure, my mother is a decent cook, but this was a different thing. I noticed she never asked for second helpings either, but she’d take them if they were offered to her, even if she looked kind of amazed about getting them.

It was not until the third day she was with us when she really started to open up a little. We were all sitting around talking after the evening’s parade of news on T.V.

There had been a clip of a building, or what was left of it, that had been bombed in Dublin. The commentator had said, in that in that level voice they use for good news, terrible news, and everything in between, that the trouble was moving out of Belfast, that it wasn’t “contained” anymore. Bridgie, had been sitting straight as six o’ clock, hands in her lap, and suddenly said, “My da was in Dublin the once.” There was a good-sized stop in the talk; then my mother asked, “Did he go on a vacation?”

She gave her head a small shake. She wore her hair in two braids wound tight around her head like pale silk ropes. “Nah ma’am. He went there in a van to help his mate he worked with down at the docks. His friend was movin’ to Dublin. When my da came back, he brought us a dog.”

“What kind?” I asked. “What’d he look like?”

Her eyes went a pretty fair distance away, “Ah, I was a kid then, I hardly remember ut.” She looked around blinking, her eyes that same way, as if she were looking in to the fireplace where the fire was jumping around in some pine logs as if trying to see backwards. Then she said, “but soft he was, with fine ears that stuck up when he was happy.” She turned away from the fire with her shoulders up in little wings, shrugging. “He come up missin’ inside the week though. My ma never took to him, him makin’ messes and all.  But he couldn’t o’ helped it, so young.”

That night after Bridgie had been tucked in bed by my mother in the room next to my parents’, I asked my mother whether we could adopt Bridgie or something. My mother said that wasn’t possible, she’d already asked about it. Bridgie’s family loved her, and needed her too much.  Plus, by law, the government was not allowing adoptions from Ireland at this time in any case. There were a lot of those big, iron reasons. After my mother explained them in more detail, we just sat there thinking about her. I kept wishing it was the kind of world where I happened to be president, or anyhow head of state department or something, and could cut through some rules.

The next day my mother took Bridgie into the city for lunch and a movie and some sight-seeing. The movie was something made for kids, very ha-ha, and my mother said that all through it Bridgie sat without moving and not laughing either, with the butter-popcorn-and-soft-drink bunch hollering and laughing around them.

After the movie, my mom took Bridgie to the mall.  Bridgie liked the fancy glass elephants and the stuffed-looking Eskimo families in the field museum, but the thing she liked best was a bunch of puppies in a pet–shop window. She had to be just about dragged away.

“But we can’t get her a dog; it would be too cruel when she had to give it up,” my mother said. “She couldn’t take it back to Ireland…”

After that my mother took her to one of the mammoth toy stores. She walked her through the doll section, but Bridgie wasn’t interested in dolls. “I’ve got the one already,” she said. “Ut’s good enough.”

Finally they got to the crafts part of the store, and there Bridgie finally found something she was really warm for. It was a big leather working set with a lot of colored chunks of leather in red, blue, green, and yellow, and the knives and tooling instruments and all the rest. It was about the most advanced leather working set I’d ever seen, and I asked Bridgie if she’d like me to help her get started with it.

“Nah,” she said, “I’m quick at the readin’ and I can soak in the directions. Don’t put yourself out for me Mitch.”

I wanted to help her all right, though, so a few nights after that I talked her into going ice skating with me down at the town lake. She didn’t exactly skate when we got there, but I pushed her around on the skates I rented for her.

After a while it started to snow, and going home I carried Bridgie on my back and she carried my skates. I pranced like a horse in the snow and once I heard her laugh.

But on the porch back home when I was brushing snow off her shoulders she said, “I shouldn’t ‘a gone. I’ve missed out a whole night ‘o my leatherin’.”

“Hmm…leathering is supposed to be fun too,” I said, “like skating. How are you coming with it?  You sure are spending a lot of time leathering.”

“I’m learnin’,” she said. “It went slow at the first. Them directions was set down by a blitherin’ lump. But now I’m swarmin’ around in it.” Then she said, fast, “Please Mitch, I’d like a place to work outside the fine room where I do my sleepin’.”

I’d happened to look in that room and see her working, chewing her tongue and frowning and fierce. She’d been so into it she hadn’t even seen me. Now she said, “It’s not the need ‘o elbow room, there plenty ‘o that. It’s, I’m afraid o’ carvin up the pretty floor. There’s the workshop out in your garage, the one next to where you keep the ottomobiles. It’s even got the heater, if ya could spare the oil for that.”

I swept out the workroom and got the heater jets open and working the next morning before I went to school. It was a place I’d spent a whole lot of my own time in as a young child, working like crazy on model airplanes and boats. When I got home that afternoon I found she’d spent most of the day out there; I walked out of the back door and went to the workroom window, but she wasn’t inside. Then she came around the corner of the garage from the lane in back of it. Her hair was mussed and she looked as though she’d been doing a hundred yard dash. “Ah, I had to take me a walk,” she said. “Ut gets scrooged up, laborin’ so over the bench the many hours.”

I started into the work room to turn off the lights, but she ran ahead of me. “Here, I’ll do ut” she flipped them off. I could see she didn’t want me to see what she was making. She shut the door. On the way back to the house she said, looking at the ground,

“Ya won’t peach on me? Ya won’t tell?!? Sometimes I just like swingin’ around the neighborhood. I won’t get lost and shame ya.”

We were almost at the back porch steps. She said, “Its fine, walkin’ where ya please. Not havin’ to stay in the district.”

“District?” I said.

“Ah, that’s the boundaries. You don’t go past ‘em unless you’re a fool bent on destruction. The district is where you and your people stay inside of.”

I’d never even started to think how it would be living inside of a few blocks and not stepping over a line. And then I did.

She was out in the workroom the next day after breakfast; my mother told me she came in for lunch and then swept right out again. She did the same thing after dinner till I went out and called her in because it was her bedtime. My mother said she was a little worried about all this hang up with leather craft, but my father said, “Maybe privacy is the rarest thing we can give her,” and my mother gave in to that. I didn’t tell them about the walks around the neighborhood; Bridgie could take care of Bridgie, all right.

A couple of days before it was time for her to go back – something we weren’t mentioning any of us—my mother and father sailed off into the evening to visit some friends. Then about nine-thirty my mother called to tell me they were going to stay longer than they planned, and to be sure to get Bridgie in from the workroom around ten. After that, though, the phone rang again; it was a girl from school that I’d been interested in for a while now. It wasn’t till we’d finally said goodnight that I sat up and noticed it was ten-thirty.

I bolted out into the night, down the black porch steps and yelled for Bridgie. There wasn’t any answer; the whole night seemed as quiet as a white piece of steel. I crunched through the snow that had fallen the day before and looked in at the workroom window. The bench light was off.

A second later, I saw her foot prints, leading back to the lane.

Halfway down the lane, though, the foot prints started to get mixed up with the tire tracks and were hard to make out. But that was alright because by then I could see Bridgie herself she was easy to spot, down by the end of the lane where the boulevard started not far from the street light, kneeling down beside a ribby old black and tan dog. The dog looked as though it might have had Airedale in it, along with four or five other breeds; on its hind legs it would have been about as tall as Bridgie was.

She didn’t turn around, maybe didn’t hear me, when I came up closer. She was fitting a new collar around the dog’s neck. It was acting pretty patient; she talked to it in a kind of low crooning-scolding kind of way. “Hold your head up,” she was saying. “You’ll be proud and solid as the Rock of Cashel now, and don’t be tryin’ to scrape ut off or lose ut. Ut’s your ticket to some fine homes. They’ll feed ya up. They’ll think ya been a pet, they’ll b’lieve you’re valuable…”

About that time, she saw me. She gave the green leather collar a pat, just as the same, before she stood up. It was tooled with a lot of careful flowers, and I recognized one of the brass buckles from the giant leather working set.

“Well, you’ve caught me out,” she said.  “That was the last of the leather, so ut’s just as well. I fitted out an even dozen creatures. It was hard findin’ em’ all, some I had to folla for blocks. But none had the collars before, and now they have. It makes their chances o’ havin’ a home much grander. You’re not angered?”

I didn’t say anything. I just stuck a hand down to her and she took it. We went back along the lane. She said, “The collars a kind o’ door key. Ya’d be faster to take in a dog with a collar, wouldn’t ya, now? I still didn’t say anything and she looked up at me.  “There’s no hard feellin’s, for the immense cost o’ the leatherin’ outfit?”

I said “it’s okay Bridgie.”

Then I lifted her up (for nine she doesn’t weigh a lot) and carried her home.

Before she went up to bed she said, “you’re glad o’ me? You’ll ask me back someday when ut’s allowed by our mutual governments?”

“Sure,” I said. I kissed her on the forehead. She grinned quickly and broadly, and said, “Yah! Mush!” then backed away and skipped off upstairs.

I’m writing this at the desk Bridgie used to come up to and stand behind while she looked at me to make sure I was still here. I’m still here. Tonight on the news there was some cut-ins from Belfast: shootings and bombings. A while ago I heard a dog outside in the dark howling a little, and then going away. I don’t know if it had the collar or not.  I turned around when I heard it, but Bridgie wasn’t there of course. She’s back home in her District. But maybe that’s not exactly true either… because I think Bridgie’s District is the world.

By Paul Boles