Fever (21 page)

“You were only a kid,” Connie said indignantly. “Kids aren’t supposed to know what to do. Adults are.”

I leaned back against the sofa and sighed. I wanted to ask her, you’re an adult—do you know? Connie sat in her father’s chair with her eyes closed. There was no sound from upstairs. Moths bumped softly against the screens.

“Let me tell you something I did,” I said. “It was the first thing that I can remember doing against him. When I was ten I started to get sick. I’d catch a cold, it would get worse and worse, I’d run a fever, I’d develop a pain in my side, and then I’d be sent to the hospital. The doctor could cure me with antibiotics, but he couldn’t figure out what was causing the trouble, so that winter I was in the hospital three or four times for a week each time.” Across from me Connie sat motionless, pinning me with her large, dark eyes. I shifted my eyes to my knees.

“You know I came from a big family, and my mother was busy and overworked, so when I got sick she would make a bed for me on the couch in the living room where she could keep a close eye on me and so she wouldn’t have to keep running upstairs. At night my father would carry me up to bed.”

“One night, I think it was my second or third bout with this sickness, and it was just before I went back to the hospital and I was feverish and suffering with a steady, dull ache in my side, my father came and picked me up gently in his arms. We lived in a small, crowded house and when he moved from the living room into the hall he had to change directions with me in his arms to go
around the newel post to start upstairs. He had to do this carefully in that cramped space so as not to bang me up against it. This particular night when he rounded the newel post, I cried out, and my mother came from the kitchen angry with him and criticized him for not being careful enough with me. And he said to her, he was hurt and puzzled, that he hadn’t even touched the newel post.” I lifted my eyes to Connie now. She was still staring at me, frowning now, listening intently. I was a little embarrassed and began to wish I had never started the story.

“Do you know, he hadn’t touched the newel post? I faked the whole thing.”

“Why did you do that?” Connie asked. I shrugged.

“Looking for attention, I guess,” I said, deciding in that instant not to tell her anything about the dynamics of our family. She was silent, thinking.

“But he would never have known that you’d faked it,” she said. “It shouldn’t have affected his attitude toward you.”

“But the point is,” I said, “why did I do that to him if I loved him?” Suddenly I knew the answer, something I’d been secretly puzzling over for years. I opened my mouth to say it out loud, then held back. My poor father, eternally caught between my mother and me.

“Oh, who knows!” Connie said, suddenly impatient, her anger returning. “My father used to take James hunting. He wouldn’t take me. I asked him if I could go, but he just laughed and said girls didn’t hunt. All that stupid stuff that was typical of that time. And he coached James’ soccer team for a couple of years too, but he never did anything with me. Christ! I can’t remember ever doing something with him, just the two of us. Not ever in my whole life. I can’t forgive him for that.”

“I don’t think I can remember being alone with my father either,” I said, a little surprised at this realization. We were silent
for a time, listening to the soft hum of the summer night. “I still dream about him,” I said.

The funeral was a typical, simple ceremony, so smoothed out by the funeral director’s craft that there was no way to tell that it was James’ and Connie’s father’s funeral except when his name was mentioned and the details of his life recited. I liked James’ father. He was once a big man with a gentle air and a sort of distance to him that I was beginning to see in James. I thought of the big room below us full of empty coffins, ‘caskets’ the funeral director had called them, with price tags placed discreetly on the quilted satin interiors. The departed one. It saddened me that his funeral was so smoothed out, so homogenized. I pictured us dancing around a fire, screaming and crying, throwing spears, drawing blood, and for an instant I felt better.

But James’ grief got the better of him, and when he broke down and sobbed Connie handed him her hankie without even looking at him. She stared straight ahead, her face a mask, her lips tight, her hands pressed together in her lap. I felt more sorry for her than I did for James, because he was at least able to get some satisfaction out of his grief, knowing as he did that he felt as he was supposed to.

I thought about Connie saying that she hadn’t one memory of doing something with her father, and that I had agreed. But I had suddenly remembered that once my father took me fishing.

One summer our parents packed us and half our household goods into our old car and took us for a holiday at a lake not far from the city. We stayed a week, crowded into a rented, one-room cabin with a toilet out back in the bush and every day my father went fishing. One morning, I don’t know how it happened, but he took me with him. I remember creeping out of bed very early when everyone else was still asleep, and the two of us going out into the bright morning. He rowed us in a rented rowboat out
into the middle of the lake where we stopped and he baited my hook with a minnow. Then I trailed my line in the water while he cast. After a while I felt a tug. I was very excited, and with my father’s help, I reeled in a small fish, a perch, I think.

When we got back to shore, my father having failed to catch anything, I raced up to the cabin to show my fish off. Then my father, not my mother, lit a fire in the cookstove and fried my fish. And the two of us alone, ate it for our breakfast.

But even though it was the only fish I ever caught in my life, and my only memory of being alone with my father, no matter how hard I searched, it didn’t feel like a special happening. It lacked the feel of intimacy and the tender joy such memories are supposed to have, and I couldn’t understand why.

The following morning we began to clean out the house, to ready it to be sold. I was surprised at how well James lent himself to the enterprise, seeming even to enjoy it a little. The three of us traipsed down the stairs to the musty, badly-lit basement.

“You go through that closet, Carol,” Connie said to me. “It’s only old clothes and I think it can all be thrown out, but if you see anything fit for the Salvation Army, put it in a separate pile. I’m going to go through this junk.” She nodded to one corner of the basement that was piled high with rolled up rugs, broken chairs and small tables, floor lamps without shades, neatly closed dusty cardboard boxes and scarred, dust-covered suitcases. James watched her. Connie didn’t invite him to help her, and after a second, he went to the opposite corner where the old water heater stood and a set of cobwebbed shelves laden with objects made mysterious by their covering of dust.

Connie began pulling out a broken wooden chair which fell apart in her hands, the pieces rattling against the cement floor. She sneezed when the dust flew out of a couple of faded scatter
rugs as she pulled them down and tossed them behind her.

“Well, for heaven’s sake,” she said. James and I stopped what we were doing to come and see what she had found. She crawled over the suitcases, pushing them out of the way, and threw back the last corner of the sheepskin rug that had been covering the tall cabinet with the murky glass doors standing against the wall.

“It’s dad’s gun cabinet,” James said. Connie rattled the doors, trying to open them.

“Let me,” James said, and pushed more boxes and suitcases out of the way till he reached her. She stood aside, he bent, did something with the latch, and the doors opened with a squeak.

It seemed to me there was an unnatural silence in the basement as James reached in and lifted out a long-barrelled gun.

He fingered it for a moment, rubbing his palm along the scarred stock, then said to me without lifting his eyes from the gun, “It’s dad’s old twelve gauge. I used to hunt ducks with him. He let me use it.” He lifted the gun to his shoulder and sighted down its barrel, then swung the barrel in an arc as if he’d sighted birds, one eye screwed shut.

“Oh, for god sake,” Connie said. “Here, let me.” He looked a little surprised, but took it down from his shoulder and handed it to her. I expected her to sight down its barrel too, but she didn’t, she merely held the gun in front of her as if she were weighting it, then abruptly she let go to put one hand to her face. She did it so quickly that the gun over-balanced and would have fallen to the floor if James hadn’t caught it. They stood for a second, not quite looking at each other, the gun between them.

“It sure needs cleaning,” I said.

“Dad used to keep it clean,” James said. “I guess he lost interest in duck hunting after mom died.”

“It looks old,” I said. The gun had a handmade look about it,
compared with the few guns I had seen with their gleaming barrels, sleek, polished wooden stocks and lethal-looking, streamlined breeches.

“It belonged to his father,” James said, taking it back from Connie and rubbing at the engraved patch on the breech using his handkerchief. “And now, I guess it’s mine.” He broke the breech and peered into its workings.

I could feel Connie suddenly become alert at this, as if it hadn’t occurred to her that this object wouldn’t be given away or thrown out like the others, but she didn’t speak, and because James didn’t either, I said, “My father never hunted. I can’t remember even hearing him talk about hunting.” The thought of my gay, sensuous father going out to hunt in the cold fall mornings struck me as incongruous. He liked dances and parties for recreation, he liked to sit in the bar with his friends, he liked talk best. Only fishing sometimes, that was the only thing he did.

“It was his arthritis,” James said. “He had to give up most things after his arthritis set in.” His voice broke and he cleared his throat.

“He managed pretty well after mother died,” Connie said. “Once he got a housekeeper.” Their father had always been going to move to an apartment in a month or so, or in the spring, but five years had passed and now he had made his final move.

“He isn’t suffering anymore,” James said, and I thought he would cry. “I’m glad to have his gun.” Again I felt Connie tense, less suddenly this time, but again she didn’t say anything.

I felt myself irritated with her, although guiltily so, reminding myself that she had just lost her parent, but when my father died he had nothing; there was nothing to quarrel over. Their tiny house that wasn’t even paid for went to our mother, and other than that, and his old car which went to a teenage nephew for a jalopy, he had lived his life without acquiring anything of value,
sentimental or otherwise. Is that sad? I found myself wondering. Did he know that? Did he care? Was it deliberate?

Thinking of his old car reminded me of the time he offered me a ride to school that I didn’t want to take because I wanted to walk with my friends. But he insisted that I go with him and I knew if I refused he would have given me one of his accusing glares, he would complain about me to my mother, and then he’d stomp out of the house and slam the door. So, to avoid the fuss, I consented to be driven.

It was early fall, it had rained the night before and then frozen, so that all the city streets were coated thinly with ice. My father drove slowly, and it was early enough that there was hardly anybody out. He stopped at an intersection only a couple of blocks from home and a woman coming up behind us misjudged the slipperiness and ran into us. My father got out, I thought there would be shouting and swearing, but there was none, and when he got back into the car, thinking somehow that this was a reprieve, I said I’d walk the rest of the way. He became very angry and growled at me and glowered and would have shouted, but I said, ‘okay, okay,’ quickly. We drove the rest of the way in silence and I was half an hour early for school.

It took us three days to finish cleaning the house and to make the arrangements for the disposal of the furniture which was sold to an agent, and for the house, which was going to be handled by a realtor. We had packed the dishes and the bedding and the personal items and had made arrangements to have them shipped either to Connie’s home in Montreal or to ours. There was nothing more to be done.

James and I were in the guest bedroom packing. Our suitcases were open on the double bed and the room had been stripped of knick-knacks, bedding and curtains. Connie knocked on the door.

“Are you finished packing?” I asked her.

“Not quite,” she said, in a tone that made even James look up. Now I was the one to tense, seeing the expression on her face. She was dressed for travel in a white suit, her hair was up, formally arranged in a chignon again and her makeup was fresh, but mask-like it was so thick. She lifted her hands and placed them together at her waist like a choir girl. Her heavy gold bracelets clinked dully.

“I want dad’s gun,” she said.

“What?” James said.

“I want his gun.” It lay on the bed above our suitcases, its long, heavy double barrels corroded and dirty. The leather padding at the end of the stock was worn through and the stuffing was spilling out onto the mattress. The breech and its workings were black. It was a very old gun.

“You don’t hunt,” James said.

“Neither do you.”

“Yes, but …” James began, then looked at me. When I said nothing, he went on, “I used to hunt with dad all the time.” His hands went to the gun and then he was lifting it, putting it to his shoulder again, sighting along its barrel. “I remember the first time I fired it. I accidentally shot both barrels at once and the recoil knocked me flat on my back. You should have seen the bruise I had on my shoulder. I thought I’d broken it.” I realized he was talking to me, but he was looking at Connie, pleading silently with her. She took a couple of steps toward him, her expression not wavering. “I think it rightfully belongs to me,” James said stiffly.

Connie said, “I want it.” She did not say, both of you owe it to me, although it seemed I could hear the words between them. After a moment James set the gun carefully against the bed, its butt resting on the floor. Connie went out of the room.