Things as They Are (24 page)

While he sat up the blood continued to pour from his mouth and nose. It was better to lie back down. He was feeling weak but he told himself that was because he had taken nothing that morning but a cup of instant coffee. “I’ll rest and my strength will come back,” he told himself.

Gil closed his eyes and became aware of the powerful scents of sage, milkweed, grass. How was this possible in a place scoured clean? Then he realized they were coming from his clothes, had been ground into them by the dragging.

During the next three hours he tried a number of times to sit himself up, but the blood always ran so freely from his mouth he resigned the attempt. “Not yet,” he muttered to himself. “In a while.” He had little sense of passing time. There was only thirst and the stiff, scratchy ache of the wounds on his face, hands, legs.

When the sun shone directly down into his face he realized it was noon. The bright light in his eyes and the time of day made him think of Ronald. He would be waking now, looking up at his airplanes.

He had asked Ronald: “What is it with you? Why do you stare up at those planes?” And Ronald had said: “I like to pretend I’m up there, high enough to look down on something or somebody for once in my life.”

Gil had laughed as if it were a joke, but it was an uneasy laugh.

Suddenly the old man was seized by a strange panic.
Making a great effort, he sat himself up. It was as if he hoped the force of gravity would pull everything he just now thought and saw down out of his head, drain it away. What he saw was Ronald’s lashless eyes, singed hair, red burning face. What he thought was that such a face belonged to a man who wished to look down from a great height on fire, on ruin, on devastation, on dismay.

When the old man collapsed back into the wire he saw that face hovering above, looking down on him.

“You’ve got no right to look down on me,” he said to the burning sky. “I came to fix your fences. I gave you the home place and showed you how to keep it.”

His vehement voice filled the clearing and argued away the afternoon. It became harsher and louder when the sun passed out of Gil’s vision and he could not raise himself to follow its course. The horse grew so accustomed to this steady shouting and calling out that only when it suddenly stopped did the gelding prick its ears, swing its head, and stare.

WHEN I WAS ELEVEN
, shortly after my mother was diagnosed as tubercular and admitted to the provincial sanatorium for treatment, my dad delivered me for the summer into the care of a virtual stranger, my Grandma Bradley. An only child, mother’s darling, and (if I may say so myself) precociously resourceful in the manipulation of adults, I found Grandma Bradley a hard nut to crack, a dangerous customer. None of the tactics so successful with my mother had any effect on her. She scoffed at feigned illness, shed flattery the way a duck sheds water, and made it a policy to assume the worst when it came to children. To be perfectly frank, I don’t think she cared for me much.

That she didn’t came as no big shock to me – I was not exactly my father’s favourite either. I won’t say that he actively disliked me because that would be putting the case too strongly. It was just that he was so smitten with my mother, so head over heels in love with her, that she monopolized all his consideration. My father’s memory, which never failed him when it came to my mother’s birthday and red-letter days such as wedding anniversaries, went all fuzzy when it came to particulars concerning his son and heir.

“Charlie turned eleven, May 7,” he’d inform polite inquirers after my age.

“Twelve,” I’d correct.

“That’s right, twelve,” he’d say. “He’s going into grade six.”

“Seven,” I’d say. “They accelerated me last year.”

“That’s right, grade seven,” he’d amend. “He’s going into grade seven come September.”

After one summer chez Grandma Bradley, I made it clear to my father that the experiment of 1959 had been a failure and that I would prefer hard time in Bible Camp to another June and July passed under her roof. Of course, my father didn’t listen then, just like he didn’t listen any other time I opened my mouth.

Almost a year later, we got word that Mother was slated soon to be discharged from hospital. Immediately my father concluded that an extended vacation in the bracing, pure, tonic mountain air of Banff would be just what was needed to cap her recovery. Thrilled by the idea of holidays in the blue Canadian Rockies, I encouraged my father in his plans. Don’t think I didn’t throw a spectacular shit conniption when I discovered I wasn’t part of them. However, lacking a mother at home to wheedle and whine at, I didn’t have a sniff at getting Pop’s mind changed. “You’re twelve now, Charlie,” he said. “It’s about time you learned that the world doesn’t revolve around you. Your parents are people with wishes too. After such a long separation your mother and I need to get re-acquainted with one another – in private.”

Where was I going? Back to the farm for a rerun of the summer of 1959.

The driver of the
STC
bus did as my father had requested, he pulled over to the shoulder of the highway and let me off with my bag at the access road to Grandmother’s farm. The air brakes gasped wheezily, the tires churned in popping gravel, the roar of the motor faded into the distance and reluctantly I
set off, heavy suitcase bucking against my thigh as I lurched toward the farmhouse screened behind the windbreak of evergreens. It was hotter that day than the hubs of hell, and the blowsy, yellowing spruce which lined the road held the air trapped and so deathly still that after fifty yards I was panting like a done dog.

At intervals, whenever my arm threatened to tear loose from my shoulder socket, I would fling the suitcase down in the dust, thump a few kicks into its guts, and curse my father, prompting a drab fireworks of sparrows to explode out of the spruce. For several frantic moments the dizzy, desperate birds would wheel headlong to and fro across the bleached, empty sky and then sweep back into the trees, showering me with plaintive cries and bobbing the spruce boughs as they fussily resettled themselves.

Once I’d exhausted myself victimizing the luggage, I slumped down on it to recover my breath and feel sorry for myself. But in a few minutes that became uncomfortable too, what with the sun drumming up a sick headache behind my eyes and clouds of insects rising out of the ditches to swarm me. Driven to distraction, I’d hoist my bag and stagger forward, telling myself that just around the turn in the road waited a cooling beverage, shade, and, if I was lucky, maybe even an electric fan.

This was the best I could expect up the road. The year before, my father had been able to whip up my enthusiasm, con me with his blather about how I was going to a “real farm.” Back then, when I was eleven, innocent and naive, the words “real farm” had conjured up visions of a dog gambolling loyally at my heels, a fishing hole, maybe a pony to ride. Best of all, a gun to shoot and wildlife to massacre. What I discovered on arriving was a dust-bowl-Okie nightmare, junked machinery, unpainted out-buildings patched with flattened tin cans and defunct licence plates, ziggurats of rotten manure, the only farm livestock idiot chickens living an outlaw life, gobbling bugs and flamboyantly strutting about the
property. In charge of this god-forsaken garden spot was the most frightening adult I had ever encountered: Matilda Bradley, six feet and 180 pounds of chain-smoking, out-of-the-bottle-auburn-hair, seventy-year-old, hard-ass grandmother.

At last the farmyard hove into view, looking even sorrier than I had remembered it. There was the row of derelict DeSotos Grandpa Bradley had once cannibalized for parts, which were now nesting sites for Grandma’s scrawny range chickens, the bright orange of their rusting hoods and roofs decorated with spatters and curlicues of white chicken shit. A number of hens gave me a glassy stare as I trudged toward them, then stretched their necks and scuttled away stiff-legged to seek cover in the weeds which overran the farm, rank plantations of pigweed and ragweed, stinging nettle nearly as tall as I was, buttons of bright yellow dandelion, purple-tipped candelabras of Scotch thistle. Off in the distance I could see that the roof of the nag-backed barn had sunk a little lower in the kidneys and that the sun stared more boldly through chinks in its planking. The house was in slightly better shape – still solid but exhibiting symptoms of senility. Its paint scabby, peeling, and the wooden shingles above the eaves showing a suspicious green stain – maybe lichen. The porch also appeared to be tipping forward, straining to tear itself free from the main building.

Just as I was heaving my suitcase up the worn, splintered steps of the house, Grandma stepped out to greet me, dressed fit to kill in a navy-blue skirt with matching jacket, a jet necklace and jet earrings. Around the house her uniform was a baggy dress and a battered pair of unlaced men’s sneakers, but for any public appearance, even grocery shopping, she never failed to deck herself out in all her finery. Naturally I assumed her costume signalled she was off to town.

Taking a ferocious drag on her cigarette she looked me up and down and commented, “So you made it.”

I gazed up at her. Her auburn hair was aglow from a fresh retinting and she loomed larger than life and twice as bold, a
forbidding billboard of a woman. “Could be I hurt myself carrying this suitcase all that way,” I said, clutching my side and grimacing dramatically. “I sort of felt something pop inside me a ways back.”

“I’m not your mother,” she said coolly. “Don’t try any of your cute tricks on me or you just might feel something pop on your outside.” She squinted her eyes against the glare of the sun and flapped her hand at a cloud of midges. “So what’s the dope on the honeymooners?” she asked. “How long do they intend to gallivant around and leave you parked on my doorstep?”

“Dad took leave,” I said. “Five weeks, maybe six.”

“What your father took leave of is his senses,” said Grandma Bradley. “I haven’t got a clue what all this kafuffle is supposed to accomplish.”

“He and Mom are getting re-acquainted,” I said.

“What he ought to re-acquaint himself with is an honest day’s work,” she remarked. “Six weeks’ leave. I’ve heard everything now.”

I attempted to change the subject – not that I was averse to hearing criticism of my parents – but once Grandma Bradley started lashing out she had a tendency to swing in all directions. I might be the next target. “Were you going out?” I asked hopefully.

“No,” she said. “I’m expecting company. So get in the house, wash your face, change your shirt, and keep that famous lip of yours buttoned.”

Company was Mr. Cecil Foster, a retired elementary school principal, unknown to anyone in this neck of the woods before he had mysteriously appeared a year before and bought the most modern house in town, a split-level built by the town’s former doctor. It was a head-scratcher to everyone why a sixty-eight-year-old bachelor would choose to move to the back of beyond where he had no apparent relations and connections, but there he was.

The moment I laid eyes on him I had no doubts I was face to
face with a former educator. Although retired, he looked every inch the teacher in his drip-dry, short-sleeved white shirt stained with old pen leaks, and his cheap electroplate tie-clip flaking shiny metallic dandruff onto his necktie. He also wore the standard black leather shoes with rubber soles for sneaking up on you.