Down in the ground, p.4
Down in the Ground, page 4
He looked up. In a subsidized housing apartment tower behind his condo, someone had hung a banner of electric lights that flashed Merry Christmas from a balcony. He hated that kind of junk. Merry, he remembered, meant sexual abandon. It was a word that meant walking out on one’s family, and at Christmas. He’d said to Ella’s husband when they met, by accident, downtown one morning: “I bet you’re having a merry time.” And the guy had pushed him over, landing Ern on his backside. It was a shame humans weren’t angels. When it came to the complexities of sex and commitment, the urges of the jolly trouser elf were what made humans awful. All an angel had to do for sex was just think about it with another angel. Nice and clean. No one gets hurt. No kids needing a father on Christmas. It would be nice to be an angel.
He waved his arms and his legs in the snow. So, this is what fallen angels feel like, he thought. And then he saw it. He saw how far he had fallen, and what was still there, shining through the gathering storm clouds of his future—a light in the stairwell of the subsidized building, a light that was brighter than all the others. It blinded him, but even when he closed his eyes he could see it. It had come to rest over the top floor of the tower and it shone as if it wanted to mark a special place.
When he stood up and the dog pulled on the leash, he paused, looked down at the angel his body had made where he fell. The outline of his body, and perhaps his soul, was small and needed a halo. He staggered to the head-end of the imprint and began to weep as he bent and drew a halo over its head with his gloved index finger. His shoulders heaved up and down and the dog looked at him, then at the star in the tower, and moved closer to nuzzle against his left leg. And as Ern sank to one knee to pat the dog or to genuflect to the star—he wasn’t sure which—he knew he was drunk, but he was certain the dog was trying to say: “Look! What a clear night it has become.”
Cadenza
WHEN WE WERE kids, my brother and I would lie in our bunk beds at night long after we were told lights out by our parents. Because I was older, I got the upper bunk. My brother’s great fear was that I would grow too fast, as I did, and that upper bed would collapse on the lower, crushing him. He always said he hated being in my shadow. I was good at school and sports and he wasn’t. He was always screwing up in small ways. I got away with far too much. When I took piano lessons—Tony had no patience for music—he asked me why I was making up part of the piece I was supposed to be learning.
“That’s the cadenza,” I said. “It’s the stuff you make up when no one tells you what to do.”
“Like us,” he said.
“I don’t follow.”
“Well, you’re always telling me what to do even when you don’t know what you’re doing. I know when you make stuff up. I just go along with it. You’re the big brother. Someday, I’m going to get to call the shots. I’m going to be the one to make stuff up.”
He followed me everywhere, even when I didn’t want him to.
On one of my dates when I was sixteen, as I was kissing a girl named Arrieta who was known for her kissing and for loving to be fondled, my brother showed up in our basement where Arrieta and I were busy on the old couch and asked what I was doing. I told him to get lost. He stood there and stared. He knew full-well what I was doing. He was being a pest.
Later, I told him that when he got to be my age, I was going to spoil a night of his, and he replied: “Go ahead. Someday, I will not only follow you around, I will beat you to something important.”
We grew older. We went our separate ways. We tried to stay in touch, but it was hard. We had family obligations, work responsibilities. And then, a month ago, I got a call saying Tony had passed. Just like that. Passed. I hung up the phone and sat on the edge of the bed in stunned silence. It was the middle of the night. I should have been up late reading with a flashlight beneath the blankets like my brother and I used to do when we shared a room and comic books, but instead I was lying in the dark beside my wife. She propped herself on one elbow and asked what the call was about.
“Tony’s gone,” I said. She reached to turn on the light. I told her not to. “There’s nothing to do right now. Go back to sleep. Please, go back to sleep.”
We used to have plaid blankets on our bunk beds and cowboy sheets. Those were the fads for boys when we were young. There was one cowboy who always seemed out of place from the other figures in the pattern who were breaking bucking broncos or shooting up the streets of a frontier town. The lonesome cowboy was riding off into the sunset, his head down. One night we talked about our sheets.
“I bet I know where he’s going,” Tony told me.
“Okay. Where? I think he’s pony express taking the slow route.”
“Not going to tell you,” he said as he turned over and switched off the wall-mounted light beside his bunk. “But he’s going to get there ahead of anyone else and they’re going to make him the sheriff. Anyone after him will be the odd hombre in town when that happens.”
When the funeral finally concluded, and Tony was lowered into the ground, his wife sobbing, his children clinging to her sleeve, it was late in the afternoon. The February sun was setting between the headstones. I stared at the orange glow off to the west and could have sworn I saw that lonesome cowboy again, his head bent, his horse exhausted, putting one hoof ahead of the other because there was some place he was destined to be even if he took the slow way to get there first.
A Month of Good Luck
MRS. MULVEENY SUBSCRIBED to the old tradition that a person would have a month of good luck for every piece of Christmas cake consumed outside the home between Christmas and New Year’s. One home, one piece, one month was the formula for fine fortune.
She had experienced a hard year. The familiar faces of her St. Vincent de Paul group at the church had vanished one by one. She had tried her best to attend their funerals, but she had difficulty getting about to houses, nursing homes, and elder care facilities in the suburbs where her friends had been taken to live out their last days. The reality was that Mrs. Mulveeny was growing forgetful, and with each passing day’s difficulties came a new illusion that her departed friends had not, in fact, died.
As had been her custom, she began her circuit of friends on Boxing Day. She put on her black Persian lamb coat and the feathered black hat that matched and, leaning on her cane for steadiness, made her way up the street. Mrs. Calder would be her first stop.
She mounted the steps of the veranda, knocked on the door, lifting the heavy bronze knocker and letting it fall—it was her trademark knock for Mrs. Calder—and stood in the chill silence. No one came to the door. She raised herself on her toes to see in through the panes of bevelled glass in the door, but no one was home. She turned and left, and made herself a cup of tea when she got in.
Life was not getting any easier. On the twenty-seventh, Mrs. Mulveeny followed the same routine, and arrived at Mrs. Harrington’s house only to find a young woman answering the door with a six-month-old baby and trailing a nursing blanket in her arms.
“I’m afraid Mrs. Harrington no longer lives here. She passed on last April and we purchased the house in July. I’m sorry if you didn’t know. Were you a friend of Mrs. Harrington’s?”
Mrs. Mulveeny explained that she and Mrs. Harrington had been part of the St. Vincent de Paul Society at St. Agatha’s, and that, yes, indeed, it was very sad. She offered the young woman an apology for troubling her and tried to explain the Christmas cake tradition that she and her friends had kept for the past forty years ... since they had all moved to the parish with young children in their arms.
“Yuck. Christmas cake,” the young mother replied. “I’m sorry, I’d ask you in, but we don’t have any.”
As the young woman closed the door, Mrs. Mulveeny felt as if she had seen that tableau before somewhere—a mother holding a child in her arms but could not make the connection in her mind to any specific reason for the reminiscence.
The twenty-eighth was no better. Mrs. Parkington did not answer either. A neighbour called from the next veranda, perhaps concerned that Mrs. Mulveeny might be wandering again and on the icy sidewalks. “Yoo-hoo! Mrs. Parkington has gone to Florida to be with her dying sister. She will be back in February, perhaps sooner if, you know, if she is able to return.” The woman offered to take a message for her, but Mrs. Mulveeny thanked her and said it would not be necessary.
On the twenty-ninth it snowed heavily, as it did on the thirtieth, and glancing out her living room window after parting the tergals, Mrs. Mulveeny decided not to go out.
Every hour, she checked on the snow. It fell unabated. It felt as if it was a white sheet that was wound around her head and eyes. She could not see past it.
The hours ticked away and chimed on the mantel clock. The new year came in quietly as she sipped the last few ounces of a bottle of Bailey’s she had kept at the back of the refrigerator since her husband passed away three years before. The drink tasted slightly off. She would have to get a magnifying glass and check the label to see if there was an expiry date.
It struck her that so many things, even in the cold of winter, would not keep. She remembered the laughter, the faces. She recalled how Father Philip patted her on the back and thanked her and her St. Vincent de Paul sisters for their Christian service to the poor.
“You shall have the good fortune of a fine place in heaven for all your hard work,” he had told them. Perhaps Christmas cake wasn’t necessary after all.
She sat with the sound turned off on her television as the crystal ball descended in Times Square and couples with their arms around each other kissed as clouds of breath formed white shawls, white as the mantle of the Virgin, around their heads. She forgot about the Christmas cake and thought to herself: “Yes, love will go on. Love is the only thing one needs to get by on. The rest is what one makes of it.”
She assured herself that luck has nothing to do with friendship and love, though one is lucky to have friendship and love, and that never leaves one even in moments of profound exhaustion when one is all alone and too tired to go on and not a crumb of Christmas cake anywhere. Maybe the new year would be different.
Snow fell on the house where she had raised a son and lost a son and a husband, and she dreamed of a beautiful white silence that filled the room with a whole year or more of everlasting joy.
The Smell of Spring
THEY HAD COME to a compromise and moved to the edge of a small town not far from Gary’s work. Behind their house were cornfields in the summer, and drifting expanses of snow devils on winter days when the sun was almost appearing through the grey overcast. They were far away from their relatives—Michele’s were in Montreal and those of his still living were down in the city, though he hadn’t spoken to them in years.
Gary and his father had a falling out over a fishing rod. Family relationships never crumble along the obvious fault lines but at the hairline cracks that can be traced to older arguments. Gary’s grandfather had taken him fishing and, without telling his own son that he was being passed over for the rod, had given it to his grandson. The resentment grew from there. Both Gary and his father considered the rod a kind of sceptre to the family legacy, and as a crown jewel of authority, Gary’s father felt slighted that he had not been the chosen one. He asked Gary for the rod. Gary refused. In the back of Gary’s mind, he had always pictured himself living away from the city, somewhere rural, perhaps on a piece of land where a decent-sized river ran through the back forty and he could cast his line and daydream, if he ever got the time.
Living on the dividing line between the country and the town was pleasant and peaceful but often troubled Michele. They were a long way from a grocery store and even farther from a hospital. She and Gary had to drive anywhere they wanted to go. To get in the spirit of the rural life, they had sold their gas conserving sedans for sport utility vehicles that ate the miles but burned holes in their wallets. But what made them want to stay where they were, despite the crop dusting that took place once a year and the ugly clouds of heaven-knows-what that would scatter the birds for several hours after the plane passed low over the stalks, was the smell of the country when the country was able to be itself, expressing the aroma of rain on wood bark, or the musk of earth on a spring morning before the farming commenced again in earnest.
Having lived the better part of their married lives in the city, the country air made them feel alive. In the summer, there was a dustiness that hung in the breeze especially late in the day or just after the rain let up, the scent of green that stayed in the grass each morning and wove through the rows of corn carrying a sweetness with it that reminded Michele of her mother who had been an avid gardener. It was the aroma of sunburnt skin and hands that had touched living things. For Gary, the falling leaves of mid-October and the foist of the first frost on them was special. It was the smell of life, and it reminded him that life is short, and in that brevity, he had to make the best of it even if it meant turning his back on a man whom he had once adored no matter how far apart they always appeared to be in distance or thought or belief.
The smell of the country in late March intrigued Gary and Michele despite their preferences for opposing seasons. Michele loved the fall. Gary marvelled when spring broke the ice in the roadside ditches and burst the twigs in their wood lot to life in a matter of a few warm hours.
Most of the farms over the rise in the road beyond the horizon of the nearest field had wood lots, and those stands of old maple would run with sap every March. After the last hard snows had fallen, when the sun would appear by day to warm the bodies of the trees and the stars would slowly pass over the treetops on clear, cold nights so that the highest branches appeared to try to pluck the points of light, the trees would bleed a sweetness into miles of plastic tubing that connected the maples as if each rooted life was part of a mass transfusion. Once the sap was running, it was collected in white butter buckets and brought to the sugar shacks where it would be boiled for hours. The aroma of the sugaring off process was the scent of the back-concessions in the spring. The steam the sugaring off produced would hang in the air and Gary would remember his grandfather’s pipe smoke when they fished together at a long-lost cottage.
Gary had just come in from the deck off the kitchen where he had stood long and thoughtfully, looking up at the stars and inhaling the aroma of late March when he clutched at his left arm and collapsed on the floor. Michele heard the thud from her reading chair in the living room and came running. Hours passed while Michele frantically waited for the ambulance to arrive, for the paramedics to make the long drive to the nearest hospital, and for the doctor to be summoned to reach a verdict on Gary’s condition. When she was permitted to see him, he was still motionless, his eyes closed. Did he know she was there with him? Would he live or die? Was there brain damage from the delay in getting treatment? He had told her, just that morning, he was looking forward to seeing the apple blossoms in May. “Spring is just around the corner,” he said.
Gary did not know Michele was there. He was walking out into the field behind the house with his hands in the pockets of his roll-neck sweater. The corn had not yet been seeded, though the fields were dry and solid. He thought it odd that the farmer had not gotten his usual jump on the season. He worried that the land might have been sold to a developer without his knowledge. He feared the tang of fresh lumber, the gritty stone smell of new brickwork being laid, and the mouldy pungency of earth being turned over deep down after lying undisturbed since the stumps had been pulled almost two centuries before. He walked beyond the horizon line of the field where the sky appeared to meet the earth and crested the horizon. In an orchard he had never noticed before were apple boughs draping like bridal veils that adorned the ranks of trees. As far as he could see, the orchard was bursting with life. Each tiny flower would grow, in time, to become an apple.
The boughs were rustling before him and some of the petals began to drop. Gary resented this. “Who’s there?” he asked.
“Me,” the voice replied, and with that his father emerged, stooped, and rising upright as he moved forward to the clear path between the rows where Gary was standing.
Gary did not know what to say. After not speaking for so long, the first thing to say would be difficult.
His father spoke first.
“We both had a rough night of it. I was sitting watching television and I fell asleep. It wasn’t much of a program. Same stuff. A detective and his crime lab looking for a murderer.”
“I know what you mean.”
“Well, Gary, this is May. This is what the future looks like. Everything is blooming. Everything is moving on with its purpose. The apples will be good this year. The nodes are strong.”
“I didn’t know you knew much about apples,” Gary replied. “I always took you for a city guy who would take a week at a cottage and leave the rest for somebody else.”
“True. I was. I was a selfish guy. A city guy. I never took the time to notice much about what the world did on its own. I always thought I had to make things happen. I should have had more to do with you and your grandfather. He would call me up late at night when you were asleep and tell me about the great day you had out on the lake, how many bass or perch or sharks or whatever you’d caught. I was envious, but I was where I was. And had to be. Hey, remember on Saturday mornings when you were very young, while your mother was still asleep, I’d pour some milk on your favourite breakfast cereal and we’d watch those corny westerns where the hero lands a plane in the middle of nowhere, always in the middle of nowhere, and he jumps out and punches the bad guy?”
