Things as They Are (28 page)

Then, just as the arms of the clock on the china cabinet indicated five minutes to the hour, the sound of a car motor reached our ears. Grandma, who had decked herself out in her finest duds and costume jewellery, smoothed her dress down over her thighs, gave me a significant look, and said, “Like I told you earlier, I won’t be going out with you. Me he just gets a look at through the window. But I’ll be able to see whatever goes on out there, so you’d better do as you’re told. We been through it plenty of times, so don’t pretend you forgot what you are supposed to do. One more time now. You hand him the gun and then what?”

“I say, ‘The last thing in the world I want is anything that you ever touched or would remind me of you, Mr. Fancy Foster,’ ” I mumbled reluctantly.

“You bet,” said Grandma. “That’ll tighten his tourniquet for him. He won’t be expecting that welcome. He thinks this is some kind of kiss-and-make-up party. Kiss my ass and make up a face after, Mr. Fancy Foster,” said Grandma. Out in the yard we heard the car stop. “Out you go!” barked Grandma. “Now!”

Uncle Cecil was combing his hair in the rear-view mirror when he saw me crossing the yard to his automobile, pump
gun in my hands. He sort of spilled himself out of the car and rushed at me in an eager, stumbling trot. “Oh, Charlie,” he said, “how good it is to see you after all this time! How good it is to have this terrible misunderstanding cleared up at last!”

He broke off as I shoved the gun at him with both hands. “Here!” I shouted. “Take it!”

“Whatever does this mean, Charlie.…” Dazed, he limply accepted the rifle I pressed on him. In the last nine or ten days he had grown worn, haggard, and shaky-looking. His eyes had the fogged, bleary quality of a very old man’s, the misted look of a bathroom mirror after someone has taken a hot shower. He needed a shave and his beard appeared to be sprouting out of damp chalk dust. Encountered at close range he was different from the funny little man I had looked down on from the heights of a barn loft.

“I’m giving it back,” I said. “I don’t want nothing from you.”

“It’s her, isn’t it?” he said.

Trying to evade his eyes, I lifted mine to the sky. A mob of crows was in a slow boil above the windbreak, disturbing the sky with a ragged, awkward, black quarrel.

All at once Uncle Cecil began a broken, urgent, disconnected ramble. I must never believe her, believe the things she had accused him of. I knew better. I did know better, didn’t I? Of course. There was nothing to reproach himself with. We both knew that. He knew in his own mind there was nothing to what she had said. Ugly talk. Rumours. Unfounded suppositions. To think he would hurt a child in any way. There wasn’t an ounce of harm in him. If he had even the smallest doubt that there was, he’d take steps … but there wasn’t. People didn’t understand there were no boundaries to friendship. They didn’t believe young and old could be best of friends. But they could. Like Alan Breck and David Balfour. We had been the best of friends, hadn’t we? Yes. Yes. Yes.

On the final yes the gun slipped from his fingers and dropped to the ground beside him. Covering his face with his
palms, he stood mute under the bright, hot light. Moments passed and still he said nothing, did nothing, except stand at attention with his face in his hands like a prisoner awaiting pronouncement of sentence. I glanced back over my shoulder to the window where my grandmother was posed in her black dress, scrutinizing us. She made no sign as to what I should do.

And then I thought I heard Uncle Cecil say something. I turned back to him, straining to catch the soft voice muffled by the soft hands. “Charlie,” he said, “tell me that you only hid from me because she made you. Tell me that, Charlie.”

I couldn’t answer.

“Say you didn’t hide from me.”

I didn’t cry much as a kid. I cried so little my mother actually worried about me. But I was so near crying that day that I moved alongside Uncle Cecil and placed my arm loosely around his waist. For a time he stood stock still, blind, then his body relaxed and a hand came down to rest lightly on the nape of my neck.

I heard the screen door slap behind her when Grandma Bradley stepped out of the house.

A MONASTERY SURROUNDED
by fields of lush grain, girdled by dark pines. Iron bells ringing the morning stars out of the skies and the black crows into them. A dusty road at noon, butterflies in the ditches folding brown and yellow wings on purple-headed thistles, stooped monks pulling weeds in a distant garden. A young man greatly afflicted in body but ardent to serve God. A setting and a character for a nineteenth-century story, most probably Russian. Last of all, a writer.

The monastery, like nearly all ecclesiastical establishments in the latter half of the twentieth century, had fallen on hard times. Each year the number of postulants dwindled and the surviving monks grew older, feebler, greyer. The boys’ boarding school attached to the abbey was forced to close and farming operations were curtailed. But as the abbot was fond of saying, “New circumstances create new challenges.” The monastery welcomed busy Catholic laity seeking to examine and test their souls in solitude, some of whom left substantial testimonials of appreciation upon departing. In time, reports of the monastery’s natural beauty and isolation reached the ears of other, more secular-minded individuals eager to make a temporary withdrawal from the world, sort through their
lives – “find themselves,” as so many of them passionately put it. These, too, the abbey was willing to accept, charging ridiculously small sums for the provision of room and board, unlimited fresh air, and restorative quiet. All that was asked of these guests was that they behave modestly and decently, and permit the monks to go about their business undisturbed.

It was an old friend, a poet concerned that Jack Greer seemed to do nothing whole-heartedly any more but booze, who suggested a retreat to the Alberta monastery might lend Jack’s infamously stalled book the push it needed to get moving again. For the first time in living memory, Greer acted on someone’s advice, applied to the monastery, and was accepted.

The monk who greeted him upon his arrival at the abbey inspected a tall, bony, angular, sad-faced man, at least forty but probably older, whose hair was cropped so short it was difficult to detect the grey in it. He reminded Brother Ambrose a little of the convict Magwitch in the David Lean film of
Great Expectations
which Brother Lawrence had used to show in English classes in those long ago days when the boys’ school was still in operation and he was still a teacher. Of course, Brother Ambrose couldn’t know that Greer’s hair had been cut only two days earlier to foster a certain disposition. What Greer was aiming at was simplicity, discipline, control. A monastery seemed the place to achieve these things. He was travelling light all around, a pair of Adidas on his feet, six shirts still in cellophane, and an equal number of tan work-pants bearing sale tags packed in his large knapsack. The only things that weren’t new were his socks and underwear, a portable typewriter, and a dog-eared manuscript, five and a half years old. For reading he had Chekhov’s
Selected Letters
, the Viking
Portable Chekhov
, and a copy of Goethe’s
Faust
, nothing more. These were books to clear the head, lift the fog, correct the drift.

Greer was giving himself three months to finish the book and get his life in order. Almost six years ago he had published a first novel that went beyond being a modest success and
stopped just short of being truly celebrated. Suddenly agent and publisher began to talk to him about his “career,” making him feel like one of those young men who have passed bar exams or been accepted into medical school. But six years was a long time between books and nobody talked to him like that any more. He was a fucking walking disaster and knew it.

But maybe here it would be possible to make himself fit to write again. He would read Chekhov and Goethe, hike hard in the countryside, eat well, sleep better, cut back his drinking. The bottles of brandy clinking in his knapsack were to be strictly rationed, no more than three drinks a day no matter how badly the work went. There was a shot glass for measuring so he couldn’t cheat.

Brother Ambrose led him down a seemingly endless corridor, unlocked the door to a room so bare it nearly made Greer shiver, and then carefully pointed out where everything was, desk closet, chair, bed. It was all obvious but Greer supposed the monk considered the room tour part of his job. In the doorway, before leaving, Brother Ambrose said: “There’s only the two of you.”

For a second Greer had no inkling what he was talking about.

“There’ll be more arriving throughout the summer,” Brother Ambrose continued, “but for the time being there’s only you and one other gentleman in this wing.” Having said that, he departed, leaving Jack to turn his attention to his new home.

There wasn’t much to hold it. The walls were painted white. There were no pictures. The bathroom was the sort found in a hospital. On the wall directly above the desk there was a crucifix.

Greer opened a window and lay down on his bed. The scent of damp hay lying in windrows came drifting in, smelling yeasty and sweet. The silence of the building was absolute except when a door closed somewhere at the ends of the earth. Through the open window he heard insects sizzling and thrumming in the hot grass, the ripple of a meadow lark, a
hawk’s rusty shriek, the dry clattering of a woodpecker, sounds that he had presumed were extinct. He thought of Chekhov and his love for his six hundred acres at Melikhovo. Spring in the countryside had given his favourite Russian hope there would be spring in paradise.

Clean slate, Greer promised himself. New start.

The next morning the tolling of the bells shook him out of sleep, chapel bells summoning the monks to some service. Greer turned on his side and looked out the window while the bells rang relentlessly. A skim of spreading light, a milky flush in the eastern sky told him how very early it was. Abruptly, the bells broke off and in the sudden silence he heard muffled grunts and groans, a dull thumping and scraping outside his door as if something very awkward and very heavy was being lugged down the corridor. Curious, Greer climbed out of bed, eased open his door, and peered out. Except for red exit lights shining at either end, the corridor was in darkness. In the bloody light of the furthest of these exit lights, Greer could see a man starkly silhouetted.