Later in the day he is out cutting the back lawn with the push mower when Jim and Chas come to sit on their makeshift patio. The two of them look relaxed, as if nothing untoward happened the night before. Jim even holds up what looks like a glass of orange juice and says, Mimosa, Henry?
Henry and his mom don’t drink, Chas says.
Oh right, I forgot. A cherry Coke then?
Sure, Henry says.
Jim disappears inside to get the Coke, and Chas slips Henry a couple of discount cards from Derrick’s. You and your mom are welcome to come and get a cut anytime, he says. I’d love to get my hands on your hair. We could have such fun.
Henry’s hand instinctively goes to his head and he pats down his cowlick, Oh I don’t usually get fancy with my hairdos. Maybe Mom can use these, though. Thanks.
He slips the cards in his pocket before Jim returns.
SIX
Turkeys and Chickens
A POLICE OFFICER WALKS ACROSS THE lawn toward him. Henry thinks, It’s come to this — she’s been arrested.
Henry Parkins? the officer asks as he mounts the stairs to the front porch.
Yes.
I’m sorry I have some bad news, sir. Can we step inside? Even though he’s a little scared of what he’s going to hear, his mind goes to the paraphernalia his mother had scattered in the front hall before she left for the day — an old dance costume, a clutch of Day of the Dead figures, her badly tuned ukulele, a glitter hat, and a bag of kitchen garbage that hadn’t made it to the curb.
I’d prefer to talk out here, he says.
Okay sir, your choice. I’m sorry to tell you your mother died earlier today in a single vehicle accident.
Henry knows he needs to react, needs to show some emotion. He shouldn’t just stand there dumbly staring at the officer. In his mind he runs through the reactions he’s seen on television — the scream, the faint, the sob, the rapid succession no-no-no — but none of them suit. He feels more like a man who’s been submerged in water and is struggling to breathe. Yet, strangely, words seem to be forming in his mouth. He has no idea what they’re going to be until they spill out alphabet-soup style. He halts between each word to give the soup man time to make the next one up.
They — should — have — taken — her — license, he says.
Sorry sir, who should have taken her license?
You — The cops — You should have. He points to the officer.
Sir? I should have?
No — I didn’t mean it that way. He looks at the ground.
She hit a cement abutment, the officer says. The car’s been towed to the wreckers. We pieced together who she is from the mail in her back seat. But she wasn’t carrying a license, so we’ll need a next of kin to positively identify her.
There is nothing positive about this, Henry says.
He’s aware he is close to speaking nonsense, but his insides started to crawl when he heard the words next of kin. The officer could have no idea what the words set off. Flashes of Dr. Davis holding out a sickening green pamphlet with You and Mental Illness on the front, a phone call to an aunt who sounded as crazy as his mother, a deep fear that now that he is the only kin on this side of the Atlantic; all the craziness of the clan will float into him, take up residence and wreak havoc with his mind. And the fingernails, the fingernails of his mother, his kin. They are at that very moment curving, flapping like wings, in the front of his mind. He wants to reach out and grab them but knows that would be real craziness, so he clenches his hands into a ball and struggles to speak. He needs to get the officer off the porch.
You’ll know her by her nails, he says.
Sorry, sir? Her nails?
Her fingernails. They’re long and well-manicured.
Right, sir.
The officer looks confused and uncomfortable. But Henry has at least succeeded in one thing: he’s getting ready to leave. The officer takes a card out of his book and presses it into Henry’s hand.
Take this to St. Paul’s Hospital with you.
Henry looks at the card with the case number on it. She’s nothing but a case number now. Still he can’t react beyond wanting to grab for the wings she’s sent to him — a French manicure with soft pink polish and tiny seashells pressed into the nails.
Sorry again, sir, the officer says as he leaves the bottom step.
As soon as the officer’s gone, Henry reaches out to touch the wings but they vanish. He heads toward his mother’s bedroom thinking she was in a good mood that morning, if perhaps a bit overexcited to be driving out to New Westminster to find a wig for a costume party that he was not clear she’d actually been invited to. Recently she’d been delusional again but not in an unhappy way. She’d taken herself off the meds — I’m too fat, she’d said, I’ll never get a job dancing looking like this.
As he enters her room, he starts to feel guilty, afraid she’ll catch him here. He shrugs his shoulders as he thinks how old habits, even feelings, die hard. He pulls open the drawer on her vanity table in search of her phone book then slams it shut when he spies the cold cream jar sitting beside her makeup mirror. The lid is precariously set, not screwed down. Clearly she thought she’d be coming back to attend to this, she hated it when her creams scummed over. He backs out of the room, then runs outside to the suite downstairs. He bangs on the door.
While he waits, he fears it will be Jim not Chas who answers. Things have become so strained with Jim since he had to take a leave from work and check himself into drug detox. One day after he returned, Alice, impatient with the rent always being late, pushed Henry down the sidewalk toward the suite, insisting that he Just go in and take something. They owe us! Jim had heard them coming and opened the door to fling out their television set, which shattered on impact. Take this, you bitch, he said. Now standing at the same spot and with those words still ringing in his ears, Henry looks up with relief to see Chas open the door.
Mom is gone, he says.
How can I help? Chas asks.
Henry and Chas sit in the basement of St. Paul’s Hospital in a small waiting room beside a table piled with old Chatelaine magazines. They could be waiting for any kind of medical appointment. The odd nurse or doctor cruises through, all of them with the same no-eye-contact gaze, and when the attendant they await finally comes, a short fat man with beads of perspiration on his brow, he motions them to follow. As they make their way down the corridor, Henry wonders if this is the way his mother’s body came in — led down this hall by a fat man dotted with beads of sweat.
They come to a door with a sign that says No Unauthorized Admittance. The fat man pulls the door open. A whiff of something like the smell of the lab at Agriculture escapes. Once inside, there’s another smell that goes way back. Henry is focused on that smell when the attendant asks him to sign in. It’s biology class and the smell of formaldehyde on the fetal pigs. His hand shakes as he signs. He’s thinking about the frail fallopian tube in the belly of his pig, how he severed it by accident when he tied the identification string too tight.
Even though the room is chilly, the attendant is sweating. They walk toward a stainless steel cabinet with three doors. His mother is behind one of these. Impossibly, her mind and body are stilled. She will be still. I will be still, he tells himself. The attendant pulls open a door and a stainless slab rushes out of the cabinet with uncanny energy. Henry is shocked. She’s spread out nude. He takes in the fullness of her hips, the greying pubic hair, sagging breasts with nipples the colour of purple pansies, until he realizes the pansies are bruises. His brain triggers — Avert.
Something’s wrong here, the attendant says.
What? Henry asks.
Somebody forgot to finish up.
The attendant waddles over to a pile of sheets in the corner and retrieves one to cover her body, so only the head is exposed.
Henry had hoped he could just look at her hand, under the edge of a sheet, know it was her by the sea-shell jewels encrusted on the half-moons. Like the sand at the b
each, she’d said that morning to him. He focuses on the spot in the middle of her forehead where he’d trained himself to look so it wouldn’t be obvious when he was avoiding her. Even in death he can’t look at her eyes. Look me in the eye when you talk to me, young man. He sees the temples where she needs a dye job. Do you think it’s time for a touchup, Henry? He scans the side of her face working from the temples down to her mouth and chin. Does my makeup look all right — is my lipstick on straight?
It’s my mother, he says.
Looks like she wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, the attendant says as he shoves the body back into the cooler cabinet.
Probably not, Henry says. He’d long ago given up trying to convince her to wear a belt. There’d been no point, especially after she’d been stopped and convinced the officer not to ticket her because the belt would wrinkle her dress. The officer agreed that even his own wife did the same thing sometimes.
On the way home, Chas and Henry ride silent. Henry is soothed by the white leather seats, the clean interior of the Mustang, the hum of the wheels crossing the Burrard Bridge onto Cornwall Avenue. The sun slants over English Bay and across Kitsilano Beach at an angle he could almost walk on. For a moment it glints so ferociously off the hood, he thinks a piece of blue glow might catch in his eye. As they make a left onto Bayswater Street, Chas turns to him.
Her eyes were closed you know, he says. She looked peaceful.
Thanks, he says.
The next day, Chas and Henry check out three funeral homes. They settle on Roselawn where the mortician was most helpful, even giving them templates to use for composing an obituary to go in the newspaper. When they spread the various words meant to sanitize death on the kitchen table, none of them seem to fit. Died peacefully certainly doesn’t work, neither does passed away with dignity and courage. Although Chas thinks it might be good to say lived with courage, Henry vetoes it as too dramatic. So they decide to begin with suddenly and sadly.
The bit about family is easy since there’s only Henry; his aunt might as well be dead. The date of birth is not so easy. Alice would never tell him when she was born — for years she’s been throwing out all identification that might reveal it — and although he thinks it was in the early 1930s, he can’t be certain. They decide not to put it in. This leaves the hardest part, the line where you’re supposed to say something about the person. How do you describe a woman who spent a lot of her time dressing up to go nowhere? Who on bad days still ran out the door in a torn and dirty bathrobe, with hair matted to one side of her head, flailing at cars to stop them so she could talk about inappropriate things? In the end, they settle on:
Suddenly, Alice Parkins died on July 22, 1988. Family, except for son Henry, predeceases her. She was born and lived in Vancouver where she worked as a drugstore clerk and landlady. She enjoyed cosmetics and manicures, and an array of television shows and magazines. The memorial service is at 10:00 AM on Saturday July 30 at Roselawn Funeral Home.
When the announcement runs on Tuesday, Henry reads it sitting at the window in the kitchen drinking an early-morning hot chocolate. It is the shortest on the page. He almost misses it because it’s the only one at the top of a column that is otherwise pretty much devoted to funeral home advertisements and used-car sales. The notice looks lame, even the ads for puppies are longer and some of them have pictures. His cheeks burn red as he rereads. His mother would have criticized him for the number of times he’d used she instead of her name. Who is she, Henry? She is me, your mother. Not some disembodied she-wolf. He and Chas had even taken out the words and sadly because the paper charged for every ten words and those two words put the count over an even sixty, which would mean he’d be charged for seventy. He couldn’t come up with eight more words? What was wrong with him? Thinking about it now, he could kick himself for not adding that she was a good dancer and enjoyed knitting. He could have said she danced in the clubs and was an expert knitter, something to make it seem she had talent, wasn’t just a dimwit sitting in front of the television doing her nails. And she had been doing other things when she sat there; she was producing for the poor. She donated slippers to the Diabetes clothing box at the corner of Macdonald and Fourth. Her dejected voice floats off the steam of his hot chocolate. What were you thinking, Henry? Everyone else’s family says nice things. He could have said she was a good and charitable woman.
He debates with himself whether he should go to work today. He went on reflex yesterday, but told no one about his weekend. Few people ever asked anyway, which was a relief because most of the time if he were truthful he would have to say, I watched some shows on television with my mother and I worried. But now that this is in the paper, you never know who might have read it. How should he respond to people’s sympathy when some measure of what he’s feeling is relief? At least that’s what he thinks he’s feeling. Not wanting to dwell on it further, he gets dressed and heads for work.
He is sitting at his desk sorting through a mound of lab reports on rheumy eyes in chickens, when a young woman he’s never seen before appears at the door to his cubicle. She is holding a stack of paper toward him.
I need to send a facsimile transmission, she says.
Henry looks at her with surprise. Nobody calls it a facsimile transmission anymore, but she’s sort of cute and is young enough to be one of the summer students. Maybe she’s trying extra hard. He can understand that kind of earnestness as he too has been trying hard for his promotion from apprentice to accredited poultry technician. He’s been stuck nearly three years at apprentice. Failing chemistry in high school has not helped, but still he’s more than made it up for it with all the extra courses he’s taken since.
Are you a summer student? he asks.
Certainly not, I’m the new poultry inspector, she says. I’m assigned to oversee the technicians and field-testing.
Oh, I didn’t know, he says.
Immediately she starts speaking again, rapid-fire in her directions. In a weird way he’s glad she’s doing this as he is out of energy to say anything. He doesn’t know how he will feel working under this new person, especially once he’s promoted and out into the field. He’s not computing what she’s saying, except he does hear her say, And they told me to ask for the Fax God — strange ideas some people have around here.
She leaves the stack of paper on the edge of his desk, taps it and walks away. He takes it that he’s supposed to do the faxing for her, which he will do, even though it’s no longer part of his job description.
When he returns the fax together with the receipted cover sheet, she doesn’t look up from her desk. But he’s seen her name on the fax and works up the nerve to say, You’re welcome, Elaine. She still doesn’t look up. Then while he’s on a nervy streak he walks down to the chief’s office.
How’s it hanging, Henry?
Not so good, Chief.
Why’s that?
Well, my mom died on the weekend and what about this new person Elaine?
He realizes this is an odd combination of responses, but he’s not going to retract either of them and waits for the chief to digest it all. Chief is a jocular fellow who mostly tries to do right by people, although he would have made a better high school phys-ed teacher than chief poultry inspector. His face registers a mix of emotions. He looks at Henry.
I’m sorry, he says.
It’s okay, we weren’t close in the traditional way. He’s trying to slough it off, but all of a sudden he feels like crying. Maybe it’s the impersonal setting of the office that is bringing this out. As he struggles to pull it together, he realizes it’s not so much sadness for his mother’s death but for her life that’s upsetting him. He never really was able to make a happiness difference for her.
Still, it isn’t easy, Chief says.
Never easy when these things happen, Henry says. He can feel that stupid nervous laugh of his working its way up his throat so he just stands there waiting for Chief to pick up the conversation.
Well. Sorry. Sit down.
Thanks. Henry’s cough suppresses the embarrassed laugh that will fire out his mouth soon if Chief doesn’t stop talking about his mother.
Chief looks down for a moment, then back up at Henry. His eyes show an understanding he’s supposed to switch topics and he says, I guess you met Elaine and you’re wondering what that’s about?
Right.
What can I say? She has a degree in agriculture. Ottawa said we had to take her. Chief puts his hand up to the side of his head and looks down before adding, I’ll let you in on a secret, I’m still working on getting you promoted to accredited and out into the field to do more testing. Who better for the job than the Fax God?
He and Chief both laugh, a real laugh. He doesn’t know whether Chief made it up on the spot, but he’s glad for it and chooses to believe it’ll happen sooner or later.
On the Saturday, ten people attend the service at the Roselawn. Eight more than Henry expected. Chas convinced Jim to come, and he isn’t happy, but that may be because he’s stuffed into a three-piece wool suit that hasn’t been worn in years and it’s about 100 degrees outside. Two people are there from the drugstore where his mother used to work, and Henry is surprised but pleased to see Chief. Of course, now that he thinks about it, Patsy and Dave from next door are not such a surprise. Neither is nosey old Mrs. Krumpskey from across the street. But then there is the man in the last row that he does not recognize. Later, when he stands at the back of the chapel thanking people for coming, he can see the man hanging around the pews waiting for everyone to clear.
Most pass through quickly, mumble a few platitudes. Chief just waves and gives a thumb’s-up, which is appropriately Chief. But Mrs. Krumpskey takes her time.
I hear she hit a cement truck, she says.
No, a cement abutment, Henry answers.
Still, hitting something cement must have meant there was quite a scene. Was there a lot of blood?
Cluck Page 7
