The Iconoclast

She had always been different. Even as an emerging adult she had scorned polite society and its conventions that were of no discernible value to her. In adulthood she had distanced herself from her family, townspeople in their rural community who paid obeisance to values that she knew were a shield keeping others members of the community from passing judgement, even while they all covertly lived lives whose non-observance of social niceties stamped 'hypocrite' in blazing letters on their placid superiority.

She had always been independent, proudly able to look after herself. Not like the complacent cows she had gone to high school with, on the look-out for a male partner who would keep them in material comfort. Not that she hadn't succumbed while still young and impressionable, with an early marriage of her own. He was a plumber, a stolid young man with deep religious convictions who attempted, fruitlessly, to instill in her a respect for faith.

When she left him after a few years of stifling dependence she left their infant son in his care. She meant her life to be untrammelled by any kind of responsibility other than to herself. She knew, if she truly cared, that the boy was in good hands, that her husband's mother whom she detested, would look to his care. She went back to college, studied animal husbandry in the technical care of small animals, thinking she would open a clinic.

Not to happen, since she wasn't really a veterinarian, merely a technician. So she secured employment with the local humane society, earning a low wage, but calling her own hours, and her own terms in exchange. Animals posed no threat to her; she could control them, and if some were recalcitrant to follow an unspoken code of behaviour, she could inflict her own kind of punishment, and they hadn't the means to communicate, to betray her.

By her late 40s she was still trim and attractive. Until one approached, and her ravaged visage surprised. It was as though her chaotic psyche had imposed its own punishment in a very visual and disturbing way upon her complexion, utterly marring the otherwise neat conformation of her facial features. The skin on her face was criss-crossed with deep, unnatural-appearing fissures creating a grotesque mask that repelled people.

The inner turmoil of her mind and her responses to outward stimuli that exercised her resentment seemed, over time, to increase the depth of her disaffection with people in general, making of her an unrepentant misanthrope. She was let go from her position with the animal shelter operated by the humane society, and she left town. She had decided to live completely rurally, shutting herself off from constant contact with people.

With her savings she had just enough of a down payment to acquire a property that had long interested her. A tiny log cabin set on three acres of beautiful land on the cusp of the Canadian Shield. Wild junipers, stately maples and colourful birch, along with pines and cedars grew on the property. Protuberant granite shelves alongside grassy meadows. Close to the road sat the little cabin. Built a century and a half ago to modestly and conveniently house a schoolteacher who singly raised her own three children there.

Across from that small abode was the schoolhouse itself, much, much larger. Originally comprised of three rooms, one extremely large. Over the years a second-story bedroom and bath had been added, a kitchen and a glassed-in entrance running the length of the log house. Added to that was another extension, comprising a miniature suite of study, bathroom, and upstairs another kitchen. The people who owned this place were elderly Dutch-Canadians whose work ethic and pride of ownership was abundantly evident.

The woman who purchased the small abode across from their property was greeted and welcomed by the elderly couple. But the welcome soon wore thin, as their new neighbour began populating her property with a menagerie that soon amounted to two full-size horses, a miniature horse, a gaggle of geese, three miniature goats, Pekin ducks, and seven dogs of various descriptions, from small to large. The noise emitted at all hours by the animals did not sit well with the elderly pair.

That the animals, all of them, were casually maintained, the horses with inadequate and inappropriate corrals was a matter of concern to the neighbours, since the miniature horse had wanderlust and would often break out of its corral. The larger of the dogs constantly ran on the road, and often visited their property; they were not fond of picking up after the dogs, nor of rescuing them from the occasional dunking in the bog that lay behind their house. Remonstrations with the young woman availed them nothing, and soon a full-blown animus resulted.

As for the young woman, she detested the elderly pair. She was comfortable with her dependant animals, her little house with its combination bedroom-living room, and tiny kitchen. She had taken herself off the electrical grid and used a gasoline-driven pump for her well, and a propane heater for winter warmth. She had no indoor bathroom facilities, and used an outhouse and that suited her just fine. And she had a mortgage to maintain. Necessitating that as a person of substance, she earn a living.

So she took service jobs with a coffee shop, and then a local MacDonald's, and then a fruiterer in the village, and then a succession of other low-paid jobs in part-time work that did not interfere too much with her way of life. Which was low-key, relaxed, and out of the public eye as much as she could manage. And then she met a fellow at one of her places of employment, and he seemed interested in her, and he seemed off-beat enough to elicit her interest.

He appreciated her mordant sense of humour and she appreciated his relaxed personality. He was grossly overweight, but imbued with a strong work ethic, inherited from his farmer-father with whom he lived on a nearby farm. Although he helped his father out on the farm he also drove a refrigerated truck for a local dairy and made daily deliveries in the area. In time they decided to consolidate their relationship and he moved into the little log house with her and with her animals.

His presence irritated the elderly couple across the street even more, because the man was of Dutch heritage, and they couldn't, for the life of them, understand how anyone decent could become involved with someone like her. After a few more years of accusations and denunciations flung back and forth across the road, the elderly couple sold their beloved property and moved back to the city. Now there was no one to complain about her animals, since the people who moved in kept a menagerie of their own.

And they had a young daughter. Who really enjoyed being with the woman and helping her to feed her farmyard animals. The year the family moved in, the woman and her boyfriend conspired to scatter colourful candy Easter eggs on the property across the street, which enchanted the young girl. Relations began to fray between the woman and her dairy-delivering boyfriend soon after he bought the mortgage on her property, even though she had encouraged him to do just that.

They began quarrelling, arguing between themselves. She was accused of spiriting away money from her job as a cashier in a shop in the nearby town, and charges were levelled against her. Soon afterward her common-law partner discovered that several thousand dollars he had put away in a 'safe place' where he thought she would never look (the glove compartment of his truck) had disappeared. He asked, but she had no knowledge whatever of where it had disappeared to.

He moved out soon afterward. And someone, she thought it might have been the new people who lived across the street, contacted the Humane Society about the degraded state her animals were living in. Their enclosures were never cleaned out, they were never properly fed, and their health was visibly declining. She sold the goats and the two horses, and gave up the ducks to people living further along the road. It was rumoured that they were destined for someone's table.

Two of her dogs mysteriously disappeared; her neighbours suspected they might have starved to death, and she had buried them on the property. Her estranged common-law spouse took legal action against her, to have her vacate the property, since he was the legal owner. After their dispute went to adjudication he paid her the stipulated sum she was awarded by the court, and she finally left the property that she felt had meant so much to her. The property was an absolute shambles.

When finally she did leave, he moved back in, and speedily set about removing the old clunkers she had left to decay, having driven them one after the other into the ground, then acquiring another and then another. The piles of trash were taken away. The battered-down pens were dismantled. The grass was neatly cut. The little log cabin was cleared out of all the detritus that had accumulated over the years she lived there and would never discard anything.

The dogs went back to the various rescue groups she had originally adopted them from. And she, she went off somewhere, no one is entirely certain. It is certain, however, that she will always be able to look after herself, even if it is to the disadvantage of others upon whom she will prey, a succubus on society who imagines herself to be courageously, defiantly, different. And in her way she most certainly is.

c.2009 Rita Rosenfeld