The Sign for Migrant Soul

By Richard Cumyn

In nine memorable new stories and with tragicomic flair, acclaimed master of the short form Richard Cumyn dramatizes lives in tumult and transition. If the sign for migrant soul is an enigma, this collection is anything but.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Enfield & Wizenty
• Release date: Jan 3, 2008
• ISBN: 9781927855898

Richard Cumyn

Richard Cumyn was born in Ottawa and has degrees in English and Education from Queen's University. He is fiction editor for The Antigonish Review and has published four collections of short fiction: The Limit of Delta Y over Delta X, I Am Not Most Places, Viking Brides, and The Obstacle Course. Cumyn's short stories have appeared in many Canadian literary publications. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

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Praise for The Sign for Migrant Soul

Crowded with vivid life and bursting with desperate, jumbled cares, these stories do fiction’s best job: they show us the way we live now. The fragility of body and soul revealed here is painful, but Cumyn’s ordinary people still do the laundry and get to the hospital and look after the kids, at least partly; and even through the dirty joke of existence, they find ways to salvation.— Marina Endicott, internationally acclaimed author of Good to a Fault, The Little Shadows, and Close to Hugh

"The migrant souls in Richard Cumyn’s new story collection move like shoals of fish, not fully aware that the structures they create together make them, sometimes despite their own wayward inclinations, social beings. Cumyn

is a superb stylist with a wry sense of humour. These stories will churn inside you long after you’re finished reading them."—Kevin Chong, author of Neil Young Nation, Beauty Plus Pity, and My Year of the Race Horse

In Bruegel’s painting, ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’, humdrum life unfolds in the foreground while, almost unnoticed, the boy Icarus falls to the sea. So it is in Richard Cumyn’s stories. Meticulously he documents the to-and-fro of ordinary lives while Colin, or Melissa, or Brian, or Melanie wax their wings unconsciously, preparing to fly towards their personal, unforgiving sun.—Nicholas Ruddock, winner of the 2017 Bridport Prize (short story) and author of The Parabolist, Night Ambulance, and How Loveta Got Her Baby

Richard Cumyn’s long dedication to the short story is evident in the collection. His prose is understated but graceful, and his characters are like all of us: imbued with complications and contradictions of which we ourselves might not even be aware.—Deborah Willis, author of The Dark and Other Love Stories

Praise for Famous Last Meals

Cumyn’s novellas hark back to the intrigue and nostalgic elegance of manly works from the 1920s: a sort of cross between Maurice Dekobra and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.—Kathleen Winter, author of Lost in September, and Annabel

simply masterful, three nimble novellas that are sensual, smart, and very funny. This rich volume boasts a crowded cast of travelers and dancers and vineyard denizens, and political satire that is poker-faced, yet strangely giddy, an odd reality of harmony and discord, a weird mirror land that is us, and piquant prose so good it must be fattening.—Mark Anthony Jarman, author of Knife Party at the Hotel Europa, My White Planet, and 19 Knives

"Famous Last Meals is a welcome addition to Richard Cumyn’s oeuvre

and adds fuel to the argument that he is among the best writers of short (and medium length) fiction working today."—Ian Colford, author of

The Crimes of Hector Tomás and Evidence

As Richard Cumyn proves in this collection of three short works, when pulled off correctly, the novella can be more satisfying and layered than even the most complex novel.—Maple Tree Literary Supplement

…the prose and characterization are so good that I trust them at least as much as myself.—Literary Review of Canada

moments of astute political satire, contrasted with interpersonal challenges and communications breakdowns.—Winnipeg Free Press

Cumyn has absolute control over the very clear and clever narration of his characters, and can draw them into madness and violence without also drawing his prose into histrionics.—Antigonish Review

Praise for The Young In Their Country, longlisted for the

Frank O’Connor International Award for Short Fiction

and the Relit Awards

Each of the stories in this powerful collection is a genuine surprise, unfolding with agility and grace through its unusual characters, unpredictable events, sharply distilled dialogue, and impeccably precise description.—Diane Schoemperlen, author of At a Loss for Words

Richard Cumyn is a writer who doesn’t like to be boxed in. The stories collected here resist pigeonholing…—Quill & Quire

Cumyn’s great talent as a writer is how he mines ordinary situations to reveal a skewed vision of the world.—Carte Blanche—Best of 2010

"…the prose and characterization are so good that I trust them at least as much as myself." –Literary Review of Canada

Cumyn has absolute control over the very clear and clever narration of his characters, and can draw them into madness and violence without also drawing his prose into histrionics.—Antigonish Review

The Sign For Migrant Soul

Copyright © 2018 Richard Cumyn

Enfield & Wizenty

(an imprint of Great Plains Publications)

1173 Wolseley Avenue

Winnipeg,

MB

R3G 1H1

www.greatplains.mb.ca

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or in any means, or stored in a database and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Great Plains Publications, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, Canada,

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Great Plains Publications gratefully acknowledges the financial support provided for its publishing program by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund; the Canada Council for the Arts; the Province of Manitoba through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Book Publisher Marketing Assistance Program; and the Manitoba Arts Council.

Design & Typography by Relish New Brand Experience

Printed in Canada by Friesens

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Cumyn, Richard, 1957-, author

The sign for migrant soul / Richard Cumyn.

Short stories.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN

978-1-927855-88-1 (softcover).--

ISBN

978-1-927855-89-8

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EPUB

).--

ISBN

978-1-927855-90-4 (Kindle)

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8555.

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4894

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54 2018

C

813'.54

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2017-907257-9

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2017-907258-7

Also by Richard Cumyn

Famous Last Meals

Constance, Across

The Young in Their Country

The View from Tamischeira

The Obstacle Course

Viking Brides

I am not most places

The Limit of Delta Y Over Delta X

Sharon

qui me donne tout

Acknowledgments

Punch Buggy Will, On Occasion

Spears and Arrows

Five Good Minutes

The Household Gods

Conversational French

Whatever Gods May Be

The Sign for Migrant Soul

Nothing is Just

Mandrill in Repose

acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the editors of the following periodicals, where some of the stories collected here were published first, sometimes in different form:

The Fiddlehead (The Household Gods and Mandrill in Repose),

The New Quarterly (Punch Buggy Will, On Occasion),

EVENT: Poetry & Prose (Conversational French),

The Nashwaak Review (The Sign for Migrant Soul),

Ars Medica (Five Good Minutes), and

Black Cat 115 (the RalphJackPiggy section of Spears and Arrows, originally titled & i saw robinhood)

Punch Buggy Will, On Occasion

I still had a part on that lawyer show and kids still played outside, so it wasn’t 2000 yet. My great friend Brenda McPartland and her husband Trevor were clearing out his mother’s farm up near Ravenshore and they needed able bodies. In the years before she died, Mrs. Aubusson had filled the house with much that had value for her alone. She had let the property subside to bramble and milkweed, the house to peeling paint and mildew. It was going to take considerable effort to make the place presentable enough to sell, more than could be accomplished in one summer weekend. Nevertheless, I was looking forward to using my neglected muscles again. I’d delivered all fourteen lines in the four remaining episodes the writers had so munificently bestowed upon my character, the law firm’s affably bumbling mail clerk. The city was heating up and beginning to smell ill and vengeful, and I relished the prospect of two days in the countryside.

Brenda met my bus in Sunderland. She was driving her armoured personnel-carrier, a 1962 Land Rover with the steering wheel on the right. She’d learned to drive in England and would stoop to taking Trevor’s Impala as a last resort only. Without a wheel to hold or a brake pedal to stomp, it was like being captive on one of those insane rides at the CNE. Whenever oncoming traffic approached, I leaned towards her.

Give me some credit, Joel, she said, feigning exasperation when really she relished scaring the shit out of me. She used to say I was the little brother she’d never had, the one your mother gives you to torment. Brenda drove with devilish precision. I pictured her delivering rural mail to roadside boxes at top speed without slowing. She loved playing the medieval jouster, galloping our mixed-review lives headlong toward the brink.

I tried to settle down and stretch after my hour on the cramped bus, which, in its favour, had more comfortable seat cushions than the Tank did. Brenda tried to distract me from the perils of the road by telling me about the others who would be there that weekend.

Trev’s brother Wes and his wife Sandy. I don’t think you’ve met them. Their boys. Oliver would be ten. And the little guy, Chris, he’s seven already. He won’t be much help, except I’ll want to stop and hug him every five minutes. Oh, and my colleague Jean-Baptiste from the box office. I’m not sure I even want to introduce you to him, not that he swings your way, my dear. Big family in Port-au-Prince he wires money to every month. Don’t be offended if he starts to pray for your eternal soul.

Brenda and I go way back to our Prole Parole Theatre days when I was barely out of my teens and puppy-happy to be doing anything on the stage. Brenda ran the front-of-house and kept everybody nourished and fixed for smokes. We called her Den Mom, though she has no more than six years on me. Our creative director was a man named Paolo Gianetti, an elegant Neapolitan in absolute denial about his sexuality, but someone who could disassemble and rebuild us in a production so that for the duration of the run we couldn’t blink or scratch an itch without thinking about how our character would do it. Everything he made us do made sense, and naturally we were all in love with him.

Two vehicles were parked in front of the house when we arrived. A suburban van was in the space where Brenda liked to leave the Tank. Trevor’s Chevy was beside it. She pulled up close to its rear bumper, hemming it in. I had been to the house—Mrs. Aubusson called it The Grange—years before, to watch Ben Johnson take gold in the hundred metres at Seoul. We cheered and danced around the room. Delirious, I hugged the man standing beside me. We’d only just been introduced. His name was Norris Guerre. Brenda knew everybody in the business. I’d seen him in Arturo Ui the year before. I remember thinking that I’d never be that good on stage. We got to talking. I told him I’d felt something. He said he did, too. He took my arm and led me outside and into a large shed. It might have been a barn or a garage originally. It was dry and smelled of sawdust and lubricating oil. A workbench and lathe stood against the wall opposite the door.

Norris and I became a thing. We were happily together nine years, three months and fourteen days, and then about twenty minutes past our best-before date. For a while there, we were the city’s It Couple, at least in theatre circles. At the apex of our notoriety, you could see our blood-filled faces and gravity-defying hair filling the cover of Froward Weekly, circulation: 100,000. We were hanging upside down by our knees from a schoolyard play structure, the photographer’s idea. Then, two weeks after publication, how predictable is this, we fought about something forgettable, called each other’s bluff and it was Adios, amigo, vaya con dios, thanks for all the laughs. On the way out, I scuffed the paint in the hallway with my half of the furniture. I might also have thrown his Dora Award out the window.

Still, it was a good home, that sun-blessed flat above Pet Me Good on the corner of Alexia and Ghent. The pungent smell of doggie treats baking downstairs. The adorable, infuriating way Norris looked in that tweed cap my brother brought back from the UK. The wedge shape it made of his head, the stiff brim, Norrie’s Roman nose, his gondola prow of a chin. Too much profile for one tall, thin man. I preferred him straight on, with his guard down. The store is gone now, replaced by a coffee-and-doughnut shop. We’re finally able to speak cordially when we bump into each other on the street or in a crowded foyer.

Trevor’s brother Wes came out to help carry groceries inside. Mid 30s, he looked a decade younger with thick, wavy, black hair, an upper body well acquainted with the weight room, and a balanced gait. So many straight men walk as though they’re negotiating the deck of a vessel in rough seas. Not Wes, who was such an astonishingly good looking, unpretentious man that I forgave him his lack of sartorial style, which that day ran to old sneakers without socks, knee-length chino shorts and an oversized t-shirt hanging loose. He hadn’t shaved in however long it took to achieve the perfect emery-board visage.

Wes worked for a bank and his wife Sandy taught a split class of third and fourth graders at an all-girls private school. It sounds like a line from a satirical song, doesn’t it, but it’s true. When Lou Reed sings, And Jane, she is a clerk, it’s hard not to believe that he’s snickering behind his hand, giving the pin-neat, passionless, prematurely conventional couple the treatment he thinks they deserve. I’m not so sure anymore, I mean whether they deserved to be made fun of, they and people like them. Nobody was going to tell them they shouldn’t be happy in the life they chose to lead.

At Prole Parole, under Signor Gianetti’s direction, we always had to have a good reason to slag someone, on stage and off. Paolo might not have approved of Mr. Reed’s tone in that song, bless old Lou’s dear departed soul, but it would have been solely on artistic merit. Wes was amiable and intuitively helpful and his Sandy was no Sweet Jane. All business, she had come to work, laying out assembly-line sandwiches, closing packed boxes with sturdy adhesive tape, driving to the liquor store for empty cartons when we ran out of them. I liked her immediately and could see why Wes did, too.

A ping-pong table had made its way up from the basement as far as the kitchen. Unfolded, the table fit by width the space between the island in the center of the room and the stove. Wes and Sandy’s sons had unearthed matching table-tennis paddles but no ball, and so they were improvising, hilariously, with a rubber wine-cork. Brenda’s workmate Jean-Baptiste watched them intently, leaning across the island’s granite surface, occasionally letting loose explosions of "Pas mal! and Bien joué!"

Don’t encourage them, said Brenda. Boys, it would be exceedingly helpful if you could carry that piece of recreational furniture the rest of the way outside.

We can’t stop now, said Oliver as he prepared to serve. It’s eighteen-twelve.

History in the making, said Jean-Baptiste, his smile broad and infectious. He had the lean-limbed body of an elite marathoner. I shook his hand after Brenda introduced us.

You two came with a brace of parents, last I noticed, said Brenda.

The boys, who had adapted the rules of the game to suit the unorthodox, unpredictable projectile, ignored their aunt. Oliver bounced the cork once on the playing surface before taking a swipe at it. He missed. He had three attempts in which to make contact.

So, put us to work, I said, lunging to catch the wayward cork midair. I bent to retrieve it from the floor.

If you’ll walk this way, gentlemen, said Trevor, who had appeared in the doorway leading to the dining room. He turned after a few strides to clasp my shoulder in greeting, letting that suffice for the moment. He wasn’t looking well, I thought, his clothes loose, skin pasty, shoulders not stooped exactly, but not square the way they used to be. His mother had died less than a month before. He and his brother were orphans now. Executing a will is a bitch of a thing.

Jean-Baptiste and I followed Trevor to the basement, a dry, bare space divided by six support poles set at regular intervals in pairs sitting a couple of metres apart on blocks of wood. Stacked against one wall were new, flattened, cardboard boxes. The wall perpendicular to it was filled with shelving. Wes was transferring hardcover and paperback books to four-cubic-litre cartons, a ziggurat of which dominated the middle of the room. He stopped what he was doing, opened his mouth to say something and sneezed loudly, twice.

Bless you, said Jean-Baptiste, the way a preacher might.

Who’s ever going to read these again? said Wes. "They’ve been moldering down here since forever. I mean, Master of Falconbridge? Ringolevio? The Carpetbaggers? We should just have a bonfire."

Right, like they did at Nuremburg, said Trevor.

Hey, remember this one? said Wes, holding up a title for his brother to read. "Boys’ Best Book of Knots. Dad insisted we learn how to tie every single one. He tested us on them. You kept getting the reef knot wrong. Left over right and under, right over left and under."

No, said Trevor, it was the bowline. Around the tree and into the hole.

The one you really wanted to learn was the hangman’s noose. It wasn’t in the book. You asked Dad to teach you so you could string me up.

That is a bold-faced lie and you know it, said Trevor.

No, it’s not. He did teach you. How can you not remember? You made nooses everywhere. I suppose you’ve passed this crucial knowledge on to my sons.

Trevor shook his head. I may have tied you up once or twice. I never tried to hang you, he said.

So you do admit to knowing how to tie it, Wes said.

Yes, fine. I’d rather know how to fasten a bow tie properly, said his brother.

From upstairs came, Do-over! That’s a do-over! No way! You have to win by two. A thump on the ceiling rained dust on our heads.

Their father called up, Boys, cut it out. Don’t make me come up there, you two.

I take it we are the muscle, said Jean-Baptiste, testing a box at the top of the pile for weight.

Trevor explained that the moving-and-storage company would not be coming to pick up the load until Tuesday, three days away. Until then, the goal was to put as much as we could from the house into the nearby outbuilding, which was clean, dry and empty. Mr. Aubusson used it as a woodwork shop for a while when Trevor and Wesley were boys. Trevor couldn’t remember what happened to their father’s table saw and lathe. Sold to a neighbour for a song, no doubt.

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One of the lawyer show’s more improbable subplots takes place during its second season. On my recommendation, the producers brought Norris in to guest-direct the episode. In it, my character is sued by six of his co-workers because he forgets to buy their usual, communal sheaf of lottery tickets. One of their regular sets of six numbers wins the jackpot that week, and what should have been their shared fifty million goes to somebody else. Two of the litigants are lawyers, partners in the firm, who should have known how flimsy a case the suit was going to make. My character breaks down under the stress. He’s a good-hearted man of limited intelligence and he’s devastated that everybody is so angry with him. The fact that he has no savings and works in the mail room at minimum wage doesn’t deter the embittered group. Tearfully, he tells them that his routine has been to buy the tickets in the morning on his way to work at a kiosk outside the subway entrance nearest the office, but that week a frozen water pipe burst, flooding the station, and commuters had to be diverted by bus. He ends up remembering the tickets too late to purchase them, in the evening after the sales deadline has passed. Despondent, he stays away from work for days, unable even to rise from bed he’s so depressed and guilt ridden.

Resolution comes from an unlikely source. A young woman who works in the law library and who has had a long-standing crush on my character pays him a visit at home, along with one of the more sympathetic lawyers in the firm. The clerk declares angrily that if anybody should be sued, it’s the city. After all, it was the damaged pipe that caused the problem in the first place. This gives the lawyer an idea, not about the missed lottery win—they realize that the suit against my character is untenable—but about an unrelated case she’s been working on, one in which her client, a large construction company, is being sued by the city for breach of contract. She wins the case, citing extreme winter weather as the reason for why the contractor was unable to complete the project on time. The law firm receives a sizeable cut of the award in countersuit, and everybody gets paid a hefty bonus. My character gets an apology, he returns to work a happy man, and never again does he forget to buy the lottery tickets.

It was hardly my best performance. Norris and I watched it together. I