The Last Season by Roy Macgregor

and coal oil and must and wood smoke and old clothes and urine from Batcha’s and Ig’s potties. And probably Puck now too. Back in the kitchen you could sometimes smell the lime Poppa poured down the outhouse hold, once in a while the pumice stone Poppa liked and sometimes the turpentine he used to get the grease off his hands; but these were the only clean smells. Mrs. Riley’s kitchen always smelled of Success floor shine, the basement of Lestoil, and the cellar floor of Dustbane. She had Fleecy in her washer, pine scent in the family room and Dutch Cleanser in the bathroom. There was even a crazy thing the size of a small hockey puck hanging down the inside of the toilet bowl, white and smelling like moth balls. There, I never knew who’d been to the bathroom before me; here, I knew who, when and precisely what they’d done.
    Ig was giggling madly and rubbing his hands together. The lamp was dancing with the drafts and the light played oddly on his face, but it struck me Ig looked exactly as he had always looked. I had never known him with hair; had I been given his brain I might have believed he’d grown the Scotch tape naturally.
    â€œLooky,” Ig said, spreading both his arms.
    I put the lamp down on the table and adjusted the wick so the fog lifted from the chimney. Ig’s table had been laid out like a forest, clumps of moss holding Princess pine, a small saucer of water, some stones, and all through this terrain little plastic animals, red and brown and blue and black bears, deer, squirrels, beaver, wolves, foxes, rabbits. The fox beside the rabbit; the wolf beside the deer.
    â€œPoppa bought ‘em for me at the Barry’s Bay Stedman’s”
    â€œThey’re great, Ig. What do you play with them?”
    Ig looked at me, not understanding but too smart to say anything for fear he’d been caught dumb. I realized he played nothing with them, as if once put in place they were forever in place, the wolf courteously beside the deer, the rabbit content with its fox. Ig lived in a world with no winners or losers. But then, he was a loser and didn’t want reminding. I was a winner. I needed losers to remind me.
    Batcha’s reputation as a c àrovnica — something I never even realized she was until after Jaja’s death — had grown in the few months I’d been gone. The white witch of Pomerania was a damned industry now. She was even taking business away from Old Frank, the jiza from down by Black Donald Lake. A wicker basket sat beside her old rocker completely filled with poplar branches to be knit together in the form of crosses and sold. She could hardly keep up with demand, Poppa said. A quarter to Batcha for a cross and you were in the clear: smentek the devil bat wouldn’t suck out your blood while you slept.
    With Ig’s help and Poppa’s vise and hacksaw, she was splitting and selling nickels to other old women who were frightened of the mora nightmare, the girls cursed at baptism who unwittingly suck others’ blood at night. For a dime they could buy here consecrated maple keys to bury under the front door and make sure smolôk the devil didn’t sneak into their house when they were away. A dollar and she’d lance a boil with an old otter claw she kept in a special chest in her room.
    Growing up with her always around, it had never seemed all that unusual to me. But now, coming from Vernon where Mrs. Riley had her sparkling medicine chest filled with every cure the television promised, Batcha seemed outrageously impossible. How, in 1960, could people still believe that every stroke of lightning in a storm strikes a devil or that the small whirlwinds that circled in the snow were caused by the souls of children who had died without being baptized? Yet Batcha and her customers believed precisely that, and I suppose at one time I believed it myself, at least until I got to California where every day the papers were full