Things as They Are (7 page)

How Catherine reacts to this, or doesn’t react to this – she is oblivious in the way the protected, privileged so often are, they cannot conceive of opinions except the proper ones,
theirs –
makes Joseph swell with a mild, chafing contempt.
She has no idea
. For her the man with the prematurely, fiercely lined face and the woman with the home permanent and tough, callused hands are salt of the earth idealizations; honest, kindly peasants like the ones first encountered in a suburban fairy tale, Chicago-style. Deep in her heart she assumes that they must admire her because that is what peasants do with princesses. (Catherine would be shocked and hurt if Joseph accused her of such an attitude.) But Joseph knows what his parents think of women who give their boy child a doll to play with, or hang on to their maiden names, or put up in hotels on family visits. Hoity-toity bitch, is what they think. So his son turns five before Joseph can bring himself to pay another visit home, before he and Catherine, his mother and Andrew find themselves standing in the
IGA
parking lot, watching the local Canada Day parade assemble. This year, like each of the fifteen before, his father, on horseback, is going to lead the parade and bear the flag.

It is not a good day for a parade. The morning is woolly and grey with a fine, misty rain, which recalls for Joseph the barely perceptible spray suspended in the air above the observation railings at Niagara Falls. He wishes it would piss or get off the pot. The day has the feel of a sodden Kleenex about to shred in his hands. He doesn’t know why he should feel this, but he does. Maybe it’s because Andrew, holding Catherine’s hand and delightedly awaiting the commencement of the parade in a brilliantly yellow raincoat and sou’wester, seems to his father the only genuine patch of brightness on the scene, a patch of brightness soon to be eclipsed by disappointment. It’s Joseph’s guess that the boy expects a parade of pomp and magnitude, an Ottawa parade like he’s used to. Andrew doesn’t
understand that all he is going to get is what is already collected in the parking lot.

That’s the local high-school band whose uniform consists of the high-school jacket, nothing splashier, showier, or more elaborate. Also the local Credit Union, which has resurrected its perennial float, a six-foot-high papier mâché globe spotted with cardboard Credit Union flags to illustrate the international nature of credit unionism. The owner and parts man of the John Deere dealership are drunk and in clown costumes. The owner will drive a John Deere riding mower pulling a child’s wagon in which the two-hundred-and-fifty-pound parts man will hunker, honking a horn and tossing wrapped candies to the children. The few remaining parade entries are of a similar calibre. Meanwhile the hapless drizzle continues, making everything fuzzier and murkier, wilting the pastel tissue paper flowers on the floats, frizzing the hair of the high-school queen and her attendants, painting a pearly film of moisture on the hoods, roofs, fenders of parked cars.

Buried in Joseph is the nagging realization that it is wrong to assign the feel of the day, the foreboding that it is about to fall apart in his hands, to any possible disappointment on Andrew’s part. The real problem is his, adult disappointment. Because, ever since they arrived, grandson and grandfather have been stuck to one another like a new wooden rung glued into an old wooden chair. Joseph knows it is the horses. How can he compete with horses? Despite Catherine anxiously forbidding her father-in-law to carry Andrew wedged between his belly and the pommel of the saddle the way he once carried Joseph as a toddler, Joseph knows that hasn’t stopped the old man when he’s out of her sight: no woman is going to tell him what to do. And disobeying her has won him a friend for life.

Just now Andrew, all shining yellow, is standing riveted with admiration to the shining black asphalt of the parking lot, watching his grandfather show off for him on his horse.

There is no other word for what the old fool is doing but showing off and the performance leaves Joseph faintly disgusted. The pretence is that he is putting his mount through its paces, a sort of pre-parade disciplining, but in Joseph’s books it is purely, simply, transparently, a pathetic ploy to impress a five year old.

The old man backs up the gelding across the parking lot, toes pointing outward in his stirrups, urging it backward with the pressure of his legs and firm tucks of the reins. Then he jumps it forward suddenly, swings it to the right in a tight, tail-chasing circle, the drooping standard shaking itself out from the flag pole in shuddering billows. Abruptly he throws the horse’s head left, reversing the direction of the turn, rippling the flag with counter-spin. The slither of the gelding’s hooves, the awkward, comic scramble of its back legs as they fight for purchase on the slippery pavement kick high-pitched laughter and skittish, excited hops out of Andrew. He’s delighted with this cartoon.

Suddenly, in the midst of a spin, the horse’s legs slip on the rain-slick pavement with a sound like a spoon scraping the bottom of a pot and shoot stiffly out, the horse going down, landing heavily on the old man’s left leg, pinning him to the wet asphalt. For a moment, everyone except Andrew freezes. The boy, unable to judge the seriousness of the situation, continues laughing in shrill appreciation of the new trick until a squeal of terror from the fallen horse shocks him into silence.

Joseph runs through the rain. He sees the muscular arching of the horse’s neck, the legs thrashing the air and pavement for a footing, his father clinging to the horn and heeling the horse hard with his free boot, urging it to its feet with shouts of “Hup! Hup! Hup!,” the horse whinnying, straining to rise with this dead weight, this sack of guts and bone unbalancing it.

As Joseph reaches out to seize the bridle and help lift the head, the horse heaves, heaves desperately again, scrambles to its feet snorting and jerking, the old man sticking on for dear
life, slung precariously from the saddle like a sidecar, bouncing and pitching with each convulsion of the powerful body, fighting to pull himself upright. Which he does, the horse dancing a nervous side-step across the parking lot, one rein dragging, the old man leaning forward, snatching for it and calling out, “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa, you son of a bitch!”

At last he grabs the rein and regains some control of the horse which stands blowing, snuffling, trembling, cornered eyes wary. People begin to crowd near, now that the danger is over. “I’m going to walk him out,” says the old man to Joseph, ignoring the others, “to see he didn’t bugger his legs.” Horse and rider slowly circle the parking lot. Andrew leans against his father, bumps his head on Joseph’s hip, and cries. Now that it is over, now that he has absorbed what has happened, the boy is finally frightened. As the old man passes them on his second circuit he calls out to his grandson, “Grandpa’s okay, see? Look, Andy, Grandpa’s okay.” He grins hugely and strikes his chest dramatically with his fist to demonstrate his soundness. Grandpa making a joke on himself, Grandpa beating his chest wildly in this funny way, pitches the boy into no man’s land, leaves him gulping tears, sucking back snot but also smiling with relief. Grandpa’s all right. Grandpa’s okay. He says so. However, a certain grim tightening about the mouth, the way the old man gingerly shifts his seat in the saddle contradict Grandpa’s claim.

Reassured as to the horse’s fitness, the old man asks Joseph to hand him the flag he dropped in the wreck. His son tries to talk him out of continuing but he’ll hear none of that. Joseph knows it’s injured pride, the shame of the apple cart upset in front of witnesses which prevents his father from withdrawing from the parade. Long ago he had said to Joseph, “Just like a box of Crackerjacks, there’s a surprise in every horse.” What went without saying was that Rupert Kelsey could handle any of those surprises. Now he is not going to let this surprise get the better of him, not with his grandson, his son, his daughter-in-law as onlookers.

Catherine is incredulous that Joseph won’t stop him. “He ought to have medical attention! He’s sixty-five,” she says.

“You tell him he’s sixty-five. You tell him he ought to have medical attention. You’re the doctor, not me,” says Joseph and walks away from her.

His father troops the parade all around the town with a grinning face as grey and wan as the day itself, then leads it back again to the parking lot. When he tries to dismount he discovers his left leg, the one crushed under the horse, can’t bear his weight and he has to suffer the indignity of having Joseph support him while he bails out on the right side of the horse, the
wrong
side, like some know-nothing dude ranch cowboy. The left leg is, of course, broken and has swollen to fill his riding boot like sausage meat stuffed tight in its casing. When they cut the cowboy boot off him in the hospital he keeps sadly remarking, “Those are my show boots. Lizard skin. Expensive as all get out.”

Joseph knows the difficulty of unlearning the things you were taught as a kid – he’s been trying to do it for nearly twenty years. Still he backslides, caught in the current of his father’s assumptions like a rudderless boat. Take the question of toughness, grit, physical courage. Joseph Kelsey’s colleagues condescend to any such notions as the last refuge of the pitiably stupid and primitive, the resort of macho Neanderthals with brains the size of peas and exaggerated testosterone levels – football players or men like Oliver North and Gordon Liddy. They prefer moral courage, the variety of bravery on which intellectuals have a corner of the market.

Joseph has to concede that physical courage
is
inferior to moral courage. Nevertheless he often feels the need to play the devil’s advocate, the devil prompting this reaction being his rooster-tough old man. Joseph wants to argue: But isn’t physical courage sometimes a precondition of moral courage? Was moral courage in Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia possible
without physical courage, without the guts to face the piano wire, the fist in the face, the boot in the groin, worse? When smug self-congratulation is in full spate in the faculty club lounge he is tempted to say, “Let’s remember that it wasn’t Heidegger who tried to blow up Adolf Hitler, it was army officers.”

Nineteenth-century explorers reported of the bare-back riding Ankwe of the Kwalla district of northern Nigeria that they ensured themselves a sticky, adhesive seat on their horses by cutting a strip of hide out of the centre of the animal’s back approximately eight inches long and several inches wide. On this raw, bloody surface the rider settled, gluing himself to his beast. The scab was scraped off and the sore freshened up with a knife whenever the horse’s owner intended to go for a gallop
.

Life went on. Joseph and Andrew paid annual visits to Saskatchewan; sometimes Catherine accompanied them, more frequently she did not. Her family medicine practice had grown to such an extent that it was difficult for her to get away. When she took time off, it was to see her own parents, both now retired and living in Florida. It was no secret that she wasn’t missed by her in-laws.

The summer he turned fifteen Andrew trotted out a typical teenager’s complaint. It was cruel and unusual punishment to be separated from his girlfriend and his buddies, trapped for ten days in a boring, geeky town where he didn’t know a soul. Could he stay home this year? Joseph didn’t put any pressure on Andrew to visit his grandparents because secretly he was glad that his son had proved to be as inconstant and disloyal as he had himself.