The Things We
There is a photo on my desk of my
father in a suit hidden by a long black gown. Graduation day. My father has a
piece of paper saying that he could be a social worker. Instead, my father
unloads trucks, heavy with crates and boxes and pails and canisters, and
labours for the union, for his fellow worker, making sure that agreements are
kept, that the letter of the law is followed. My father works too hard at
everything and now he is tired. But we shall not want.
For a moment I am back home. I
imagine my mother saying, “Ron, did you hear anything today about the
contract?” Her voice lingers through the house and I hear my father’s weight
leave the easy-chair by the window; his feet and worn- out knees move him to
the hall closet, where he pulls out a riffling of photocopied
collective-agreement pages from his union satchel. I’m sitting looking at the
photo of my father, proud and hopeful in his black gown; short, light-brown
hair tugged by a breeze tousling the surface of the St. Lawrence, visible in
the background. I can see all of it at once; the day in the photo holding me
and my mother, too, and the college building set back from the road and the
short grass, all tended by that gust and the sun, a grainy black-and—white
glow; that day and this — my father moving slowly (I notice it is always slower
whenever I am back home for a visit) to the kitchen where Mom is finishing the
shepherd’s pie. My father and his documents, treading the linoleum, explaining
the slowness of processes, cursing occasionally the inefficiency of
bureaucrats. There is constancy in this imagined scene. A comfort in knowing
that when I turn my back Life slows down but goes on. I can be secure at a
distance.
My father stilled by the frame is
proud of his paper, the certificate rolled tight in his fist, but where am l? –
outside, somewhere, on the grass, in my mother’s arms? The invisible wind plays
forever with that now absent hair.
*
* *
I am slogging through endless
reams of paper. Scholarly articles, essays, seminars. Scanlan has noted Berger's reading of Benjamin Derrida phallocentrism
closure. Someone pipes more work onto my desk from somewhere above in
the bowels of the machinery, so I roll up my sleeves and empty my head of
fictions and set to processing another slew of information, repackaging and
shipping it along. Barthes has remarked
metonymy Scanlan. The engine,
fuelled by coffee after coffee, injected with nicotine, chugs on into night,
duty-bound.
In the morning I will have to
turn my back on the reams; I will rise, shower, eat and go to work at the
grocery store, 9 to 5. Eight hours of turning my mind off completely, trying to
perfect the art of dough. This weekend I have the night-crew shift, as well, so
I'll be returning to the store at 11 p.m. Sleep in on Sunday and complete a paper and a
seminar in time for Monday morning. Next week: more of the same. By summer it
will be two jobs, the grocery store and the hot, dusty factory making vinyl
windows. It helps pay for school and school will pay for itself, I hope.
The things we must do.
Simultaneously, my research
supervisor requires a rigorous perusal of his references by Wednesday; his
bibliography must be unimpeachable, complete, beyond question, not a comma out
of place nor a single slip in proper MLA format. I bow my head to four a.m., in
this the hour of our... but where is the
fucking carrot? I bow my head to the
pages spread flat and spinning beneath my eyes. Up at eight a.m. How long ...?
The things we must.
Thanksgiving: at home again and
Mom is in peak form, not having had anyone to retell her stories to for a
couple of months. Dad has heard them all and it shows in another old episode.
He parks in front of a nature show or toys with the hide-a-word puzzle in the
'Funnies’. Or he walks the dog. Mostly
when he wants to be somewhere else he walks the dog, sometimes three times a
day and I sit and listen to my mother. I can't help but listen. Either I like
the stories or I like the ritual. What's the difference? I am receiving the
familial catechism, like interrogating the old Bible, but with answers, details.
Shadows.
She begins her telling with the
time Uncle Fergus' tom cat, the one with the huge head, ate all the kittens in
her father's barn. One at a time they went missing from Fluffy's nest until her
father caught the unfortunate tom at it. “Dad loved animals. He was really
upset about those kittens.” He caught the big-headed bastard and swung him by
the hind legs up against the end of the barn. Then my grandfather, Daniel
Grant, took the carcass down to Fergus', walked up the driveway with the cat in
tow, passed Fergus and flung it on the manure heap.
“It was Uncle Fergus' prize cat,
but dad just tossed it on the manure pile. Fergus was some ugly." I love
this story and the grandfather, who predeceased my birth, and whom I am said to
resemble in more than looks, who so loved the kittens. But there are other
stories from life on the concession, a deck of cards that my mother cuts and
shuffles and plays out, a litany] am familiar with.
“Then there was old Stan Stadnik,
on the next farm, and that lot of his." And so begin her tales of the
Stadniks who lived more by their thievery than by farming. Neighbours dogs
poisoned, cattle and machines and tools that went missing in the night, through
mysteriously broken sections of fence: the
calling cards of old Stan and his brood. “No one ever caught them, but
everybody knew who’d done it.” There are lots of these stories, but mostly
there is the time young Joe Stadnik (probably twenty at the time and sturdy as
a Massey-Ferguson) tried to have his way by the light of a new sun with mom in
the milking barn. “He kept walking closer, close enough I could smell him. I
just held onto that old butcher knife and kept walking backwards. I don’t know
what I'd've done if he'd gotten any closer ..." It's as clear as imagined
pain. His snowy boots making puddles on the floor, the sun smudging through the
few filthy panes and my mother, maybe sixteen, cursing shakily in imitation of
the men’s voices on the porches where they sat in the evening shooting the
bull. Just that knife in her hand and
him in menacing proximity, and finally somebody coming out of the house and him
hightailing it out the far end of the building before he could commit the one
word, rape, or end up bleeding among the cows' hooves and the shitty straw.
Usually the stories take a turn
then, to the comical, like she reads my breathing and wants to offer me some
fresh air. There was the wedding — "Malcolm McAllister and the bus
driver's daughter from the fifth? Or was it Ian, the one who always had a runny
nose? Anyway" — when the men let the goat into the house during the
reception and it ran all over the place, pissing on the father of the bride,
and the men outside, all spic'n'span in their Sunday go-to-meetin' clothes, happy
on corn liquor, dropping their cigarettes and their pipes and slapping their
thighs and laughing tears and wetting themselves. My grandfather, of course,
among them.
“Oh, he could be a devil, Dad
could. Deaf in one ear, but you didn't dare whisper anything halfway nasty but
he'd be on ya. Christ. Ears like a hunting dog, right up to the end." The
end, it smells to me of hospitals, the hospital in Kingston, though I've never
been there, where they poked and prodded, did every experimental treatment on him
they could. Cancer. They were just learning about cobalt and chemo
in those days, but my grandfather let them try it all out on his withering body.
For the future, for others. Or just for a few more days.
“Still, they couldn’t stop him
smoking. The nurses had a fit. His feet wouldn't hit the floor before he had a
cigarette in his mouth. Even in the hospital. ” In the hospital where he was
rap- idly dying until he demanded to be taken home, to the farm.
The stories go on, easy and
gentle and seemingly without end. My mother collects them to her like a euchre
hand, careful of the order in which she plays them, holding some trump. I sip
coffee from a black mug, steam insisting its way onto the lenses of my glasses.
Mom pours the last of her tea from a tiny brown pot and whitens the cup with
milk. Dad always asks her if she'd like some tea with her milk, but I let it
pass this time, smirking to myself.
"Funny. I’ll never forget
the day that Uncle Fergus died.” I love this story. More even than the cat swung
up against the barn, or the tales of ‘Tiny Tim’, a distant crazy cousin of
ours, and his suit that smelled of mothballs and the time he approached my
father at some family occasion, most likely a funeral, saying "Ronald, I
have a matter to discuss with you," and everyone turning whiter than the
corpse, because he was going to go off on his spiel about 'the land,’ the
imagined family estate he and his mother had somehow been conned out of. Those are all classics, but this one’s my
favourite. Mom cradles her tea in both hands. "Fergus was some
hard-headed. Typical Scotsman. I remember that night. Dad came home from
Fergus' place and told us that Fergus' bull had got loose again." I see a
bovine silhouette hulking up out of a pasture, blue-black beneath the moon,
munching grass, eerily quiet.
"Dad told him to leave it,
go look for it in the morning. 'Damn
thing’s no good for anything anyway' Dad said. Dad thought pretty lowly of Fergus'
animals." Not the least of which was the cannibalistic cat. For that matter,
he probably didn't think all that highly of Fergus, blood or no blood. “But Fergus
was determined to go looking, so dad came home and we thought no more of it.
Fergus was pig-headed, but he knew his way around.” She sips from her cup, feeding the story.
"The bull, Fergus' bull was
well—known for being a nasty beast. It stamped a dog to death once in the barn.
Toby a little spotted terrier. Dad offered to put the bull out of his misery
with a two-by-four, but Fergus wouldn’t hear of it, said the bull was too
valuable for breeding. Probably the only thing more stubborn than Fergus was
that damn bull. Anyway. Fergus went looking and we went to bed, and
dad went over in the morning to see if he’d got it back. Well, he went up to the front of the house and
knocked on the door. No answer. So he went to the kitchen and the door was
unlocked and the kitchen light was on. He thought that was pretty strange.
There’d been a couple of thefts over the last week on the next concession, the
lot right behind our house, so dad got kinda worried and picked up Fergus' gun
from behind the stove. He went out to the barn first and the cows were stomping
and grunting and they hadn't been milked or fed. He said there was something in
their eyes. No sign of the bull, though, or Fergus. Not thirty feet from the
barn, just around the corner, he found him in the field, face up with his chest
crushed."
Suddenly I am standing in the
field, looking down, looking into …
Suddenly I know the look in the
eyes of the agitated cattle.
“The bull must have charged him,
smashed his ribs, collapsed both lungs. He died instantly." Died,
instantly and alone in the dark, finding, in that last moment as the shadow
closed on him and wrapped him between its horns, feeling its hugeness move
against and through him, the missing bull. All because it couldn’t wait til
morning. ”They found his boots twenty feet away." The story stops here. I want to know what
happened to the bull, but I don’t ask. That's the unwritten rule of the sermon.
You never ask what’s held back or look at your opponent's cards. You put a
period at the end of the story.
*
* *
One night when I was home I
volunteered to wash the dishes. My mother sat at the kitchen table, talking
away her tea; dad was out with Skip, hoping to tire him in time for bed. It was
Skip’s third journey of the day down the path behind the house. Mom was barely
tolerating it: my father, his silence, his insistence on spending time with the
dog. ”He doesn’t have his ass in the door two minutes and he has to take the
dog out.”
It was the week after my father’s
buddy from work went into the hospital for double by-pass surgery He was three
years younger and twenty-five pounds lighter than my father. I know dad cannot
sit down, between the dog and helping with the housework and working on some
grievance. He will not relax. Mom is almost frightened over the edge of tea.
“Don't worry. Mom" Those are
just words that sit between us. A useless knick-knack to drop on the table. She
worries. My father worries her. Dad came in five minutes later, as I was
folding the dish towel over a cupboard door. He unharnessed the dog who wagged
himself over to my knee, sort of sidewinding, as if led by the tail. Mom looked
at me, asked dad what he was doing. Before he could answer I suggested he was
going down to the basement with me to play darts, an offer so rare that he
would not dare refuse. Mom was younger at the sink as she rinsed her tea cup
out, and I felt like maybe I was giving us all a little more time, time that we
could use to slow down.
*
* *
Eventually I close up the books,
reluctantly stack the photocopies that must all be read, silence my pen. No
more tonight. I've been slowing down,
having to reread every sentence. Scanlan… Scanlan… Scanlan. Time to rest. For some reason the room is
noisy with voices, with shuffling papers and feet. Hazy eyes move around the
room.
A group of men are playing euchre
at a table in a distant corner of my mind. I shake my head. My father, tousled
and somewhere between twenty-seven and fifty, deals another hand. My
grandfather lights another cigarette and uncle Fergus fans smoke out of his
eyes. They are talking about the government and about farming, and they are
drinking rye and coke, and I am imagining the whole thing when they spot me and
my grandfather pulls out the chair opposite my father. They need a fourth to play partners. I am
half-asleep, dying for a few hours in bed, but l stumble over; dream over to
where they are sitting. And there is the unmistakable sound of papers blown in
the wind, articles, contracts, documents of all kinds, and a smell like dry
grass and hand-rolled tobacco. I have to sit with them, just a couple of hands.
They need a fourth.
I pick up my cards, eye them up
and try to make contact with my father's gaze, over the lip of his glass. But I
see only that hair, hear his feet or maybe my sleepy feet more and more slowly
pacing. The cards. Without looking at
the faces around the table I know I`ve been dealt a lousy hand. My head touches
the pillow and we play on into the night. The things we do
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