Knucklehead & Other Stories (18 page)

☐ A crib with Winnie-the-Pooh decorations, and a matching chest of drawers full of clothes

☐ A specialized no-fuss no-smell diaper pail

☐ A Winnie-the-Pooh mobile to hang over the crib

Zelle
@
13 months
Over three months, Colm maintains a continual Barking Dog Log. Every Monday, he phones the Animal Services Bylaw Enforcement to lay his complaint. The visits by the dogcatcher become part of the routine of the neighbourhood.

The barking gets worse. Ted goes out into the yard at all hours, plays fetch with a glow-in-the-dark mini-Frisbee. The terrier's yapping incites Doxie to growl and whine. Zelle cries in the night.

By the middle of May, the bylaw enforcement officer has taken to parking a couple of houses up the street between his dispatches. Colm watches from the front window as he delivers yet another ticket to Ted. “He must owe thousands in fines.”

“I wish you'd just drop it.”

“Ma-ma-ma-ma-ma,” Zelle says. She cruises from couch to table to chair, walking but hanging on to the furniture. She stops. A jack-in-the-box with a cock-a-doodling rooster is in the middle of the floor. She lets go of the chair and stands, reaching both hands to the rooster. “Ma-ma-ma.”

“Too bad they just can't seize the dog.” He had researched the bylaw on the Internet.

“Really, Colm. You've been over this and over this.” Beverly watches Zelle. She puts one foot forward, then draws it back. “Your daughter's about to take her first steps. Shouldn't you have a video camera or something?”

Colm glances over from where he's standing by the curtain just as Zelle makes a decision. She falls back on her bum, scoots onto all fours, then crawls over to the rooster. “Ma-ma-ma-ma.”

“He'll never pay the fines. That's the thing. He'll ignore it and just keep whipping that dog into a frenzy.”

“So why bother.” Beverly crouches down, and stuffs the rooster back in the box. Zelle fingers the button that activates it. “A little harder, Zelle.”

“Ma-ma-ma,” Zelle says. She pokes at the toy, and the rooster pops up.

zelle
@
9 months
[
Gaddie's Lament
]
You dropped Zelle. You didn't drop her, she fell out of her high-chair. Beverly yells at you and you want to slap her face. You've never slapped a face in your life, never hit anyone, never spanked Colm as a boy, but you want to slap her face. You imagine the sting in the palm of your hand, the red outlines of your long slim fingers rising on her cheek. You know you did up the safety strap. Did you hear it snap closed? Beverly demands of you. You want to slap her. You turned your back for only a few seconds, you knew the strap was done up. Was it tight? You wonder if Zelle managed to undo it. There was a two-year-old boy in Utah who undid his car seat buckle and wandered away into the woods to freeze to death. Zelle's only nine months old, she can't even pick up her own food, for christ's sake, Beverly says. She takes the Lord's name in vain. Both of them. Their deliberate blasphemy.

It would never have happened, you say, it would never have happened if you hadn't had to scrub the highchair tray. You had to take the tray across the kitchen to scrub away its filth. Zelle was in the chair, but then you saw the crusted porridge, the smeared avocado, the gluey banana bits. You wouldn't serve your granddaughter on such a filthy tray. Your granddaughter deserves better. It would never have happened if. Does it ever get washed? You are too old, you think, to be cleaning house for your lazy godless daughter-in-law and your feckless son. Not too old physically. You are able to walk to great distances, carry heavy burdens, bear privation and austerity. You proved that in Africa on your mission. But for this. Why does she insist on going to work? Why does Colm allow it? The most important job she has is here, at home, with her child, with your granddaughter. You stayed home. Even after Alec died, you stayed home. You ask now if they have life insurance and they scoff at you. You could tell them. The tray was filthy. Zelle is fine, babies are resilient, you say. But you called Beverly anyway. You called and she left the rehearsal hall and now she says she'll never get another contract with that theatre and it's your fault because Zelle fell out of the highchair. Are you happy? Isn't this what you wanted? A stay-at-home daughter-in-law?

Beverly goes back to work and you move the fridge and stove and sweep up the dust bunnies and dried elbow macaroni and shrivelled peas and toast crusts and hardened bits of orange peel. You put Zelle in her crib where she's perfectly safe and let her cry and cry and cry and cry, but in twenty minutes or a half an hour she's asleep and she sleeps and sleeps, and you clean behind the fridge and stove and save the sweepings in the dustpan on the counter to show Colm when he comes home from work. Look what was behind the stove. And Zelle wakes and she cries, but you finish the last of four loads of laundry, folding the clothes and towels into towering stacks on their queen-size bed. You pick up, you dust, you chop vegetables for supper. When Colm comes home, the house is neat and clean and smelling of onions and the laundry is clean and piled high on the bed, and the dustpan of sweepings is on the counter. You say nothing, you hold Zelle, quiet and smiling in your arms, you say nothing, let the home speak for itself.

Zelle cries in her crib, but she hushes as soon you hold her. She coos and giggles and settles for you like she does for no one else. The grandma factor, Colm says. She fusses and cries, but she settles for you. So different from Colm as a baby. But the same too, the same wonder of the little life in your arms. You can get lost staring at a baby's face. Alec loved to watch Colm sleep. Zelle looks like her grandfather in her eyes and her little ears. Your husband had the smallest, cutest ears, perfect shells with hardly any lobe. Zelle has his ears, you can stare at them as Zelle coos in your arms. Colm was a calm baby, so small, smaller than Zelle ever was. A wee bairn, not even five pounds, they wanted him in the incubator but you pleaded, and old Dr. Williams showed up at last smelling like whisky and pipe tobacco, he missed the delivery, and he said, Oh, he's a fine healthy lad, he just needs his mom. So Colm stayed with you in your ward, the nurses cluck-clucked, it was out of the ordinary in those days, but Alec's insurance covered a private ward, this was before Medicare, you had your own insurance then. Dr. Williams was so old-fashioned, he even delivered babies at home, he'd be right up-to-date today. He did insist that bottle-feeding was best for a baby, especially a small one like Colm, so those first few days in your private ward, you held Colm in your lap and let him suck from the easy-flowing rubber nipple of a glass bottle. When your milk let down, the nurses bound your breasts with a wide elastic bandage—oh how they ached, a burning throbbing ache—but after a day or two you stopped leaking milk every time Colm cried and the ache went away.

Beverly and Colm insist on breastfeeding Zelle. Those first few weeks they stayed with you at your condo before they moved into this house, Zelle crying and crying, Beverly in tears. Colm blocked the doorway while you tried to enter the room with a bottle. He was always so stubborn. All of them. They made their choice and would not listen to your reason. Sometimes mother does know best, you would say. Beverly was mad. Angry and unreasonable. Her nipples cracked and bleeding, she forced her breast into tiny Zelle's crying mouth. Colm hovered over them both, mother and child, trying to offer advice, getting his own hands in there to help, until Beverly would explode and push him away and run to the bathroom where she would lock herself in with Zelle.

The dog next door starts barking, and a car with a loud muffler roars to life in the street. You hear the profane voices of men hollering gruff goodwill to each other. The dog barks. You warned them about this neighbourhood. It's old, it's second generation, no kids, bad schools. Indians from the Sarcee reserve are bussed in and cause trouble. One of the women in your ladies' auxiliary at the church works for the school board, you know the trouble spots. Beverly always corrects you when you say Indian: First Nations, she says, and they call themselves Tsuu T'ina. You warned them about this neighbourhood. It is beneath their potential. Full of old people who can't keep up their houses. Men who run plumbing and heating businesses from their garages. Revenue properties rented out to who-knows-what. You hear their neighbour's dog barking and Zelle stirs. She spits out the nipple of the bottle of expressed breast milk you are feeding her. Her bright blue eyes are wide, beseeching you. There, there, you say, rocking her gently. You sing her a song. Jesus loves you, this I know. The dog barks again and Zelle squirms and sets up her crying. You take her to show her the dog through the side window. There's the doggie, you say. The happy terrier runs to and fro in the back yard on the other side of the chain-link fence. The man stands in full view, smoking. He is unkempt and unruly, swearing at the terrier and another big dog who does not bark. You wave to him when he looks your way, and you lift crying Zelle's hand and wave it too. You do not like the look of this man, but you believe in the Christian responsibility to be kind to your neighbours. You are ashamed too of Colm and his behaviour, the escalation of bylaws and enforcement officers and community mediation with strangers over a barking dog. It is unneighbourly and ungodly. How is this man Colm such a stranger to you now, when Colm the baby was your world?

Sometimes Colm would let you take him in your arms, an unfamiliar embrace, when Beverly locked herself and Zelle in the bathroom of your condo. You would lead him downstairs and tell him stories of how he was so small as a baby, and how you fed him bottle after bottle he was such a greedy gus, and you would get him to admit that formula might not be such a bad idea. But Beverly refused to consider it, and Colm always fell under her sway, and then he would block the doorway, refusing you, his mother, near. They haven't seen the babies you have seen starving to death in Africa on mother's milk. They haven't witnessed the miracles that you have—that after two days on formula the African babies have a glow you can see even through their black skin, the hollowness in their eyes gives way to the unmistakable signs of spirit. They haven't seen what you have. And look at Colm, a formula baby. Beverly too, you suspect.

Zelle
@
15 months
Colm's dog is sick. He goes to the back yard and calls, “Doxie! Doxie!” He has a bowl of canned dog food in one hand, and a horse pill in his pocket that he needs to get her to swallow. She doesn't come to his calling. “Doxie, c'mon girl.” There aren't many places a dog the size of Doxie could hide in the back yard.

Colm checks the long, narrow space between the garage and the fence. He looks under the skirt of the blue spruce by the back gate. “Doxie-kins. Dr. Ballard's special treat.” Canned dog food is a sick-dog meal. She isn't by the composter either, but he almost slips and falls when he steps in a fresh runny stool. In that corner of the yard, near the vegetable patch, the lawn is freckled with yellow-green splashes of Doxie's diarrhoea. “Damn,” Colm says. “Doxie! Doxie!”