Man Descending

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

A sob, a darting hand, and the page was torn. The old man, stunned, caught Little Paul; but the boy’s body wriggled violently upward, his eyes staring, his mouth a pocket of blackness – a diver with bursting lungs breaking the surface. For a moment the boy’s body throbbed with inchoate fury as he strained silently in Tollefson’s grasp, speechless, and full of wonder at what had passed through his mind. Then he screamed: “It’s stupid! It’s stupid! You’re stupid!”

  “Paul! Stop it!”

  “He killed him!” shouted Little Paul. “The little boy is dead! There’s nothing left of him! He’s all gone! All of him!”

  “No,” said Tollefson, and he said it with such assurance and sincerity that the boy went quiet in his hands. “No, he isn’t. The little boy’s alive. There’s an angel, and the angel tells Abraham not to kill Isaac, and there’s a ram in the thicket,” he went on quickly, “and they sacrifice that instead. The little boy… Isaac, he isn’t dead.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes,” said Tollefson. Once more on familiar ground, he was recovering his stride and filling with annoyance. “What kind of performance was that?” he asked, handling the book. “You can’t get away with stunts like that. You know, people won’t stand for it. Look at the book.”

  Little Paul was not interested in the book. “Why did God tell him to kill the little boy? Was he bad?”

  “No, he wasn’t bad. God told Abraham to kill Isaac to see if Abraham loved God enough to obey. And Abraham did love God enough. He loved God so much that he was willing to sacrifice his only son, just as God was willing to sacrifice his only son, Jesus, because He so loved the world and wished to wash it clean of sin, as white as snow, by the saving mercy of His blood.”

  Little Paul could see blood. Pails and pails of blood were needed to wash away the sins of the world. He had seen his father catch blood in a pail to make sausage. Blood pumping hot out of a slashed throat in bright jets. Later, when it cooled, it turned black and thick like pudding.

  “And because Abraham loved God,” said Tollefson, “he would do anything God asked. No matter how hard.”

  “Would you?”

  “I’d try very hard. We must always try our hardest to please God. You must too, Paul, because He loves you.”

  “Did he love Isaac?”

  “Of course. He loves all his children.”

  “I don’t like the story.”

  “Oh, you didn’t at first,” said Tollefson, “because you didn’t wait for the end. But everything came out all right in the end, didn’t it? That’s the point.”

  It didn’t seem the point to Little Paul. It seemed to him that God, being who he was, could have as easily ended the story the other way. That, to Little Paul, seemed the point.

  “What do you mean,” said Big Paul, “he wet the bed?”

  “He wet the bed, that’s what I mean. And keep your voice down.”

  “Jesus, he’s seven years old.”

  “It’s the nightmares,” Lydia said. “They all have them at his age. Myrna’s youngest had them for months and then, just like that, they stopped.”

  Big Paul felt uneasy. “He never plays with other kids. He’s always with that sick old man. It’s as if he’s afraid to take his eyes off him. No wonder the goddamn kid has nightmares.”

  “Maybe if you didn’t talk about Uncle dying in front of Paul, he wouldn’t have bad dreams.”

  “Shit.”

  “And he spends time with Uncle because of the pigs. He likes to help him.”

  “That’s another thing. I told you to tell that kid those pigs weren’t supposed to become pets. That they were going to be butchered. Yesterday I go down to the pens and he shows me how they’ll roll over to have their bellies scratched. Jesus H. Murphy, doesn’t anybody listen to me around here any more?”

  “He knows they’ve got to be butchered. I’ve told him and told him.”

  “And something else,” Big Paul said, his voice rising with outrage, “the old boy is butchering those pigs. I’m not looking like a shit-head in my kid’s eyes killing those pigs. I didn’t teach them cute tricks!”

  “My God, Paul, are you jealous?” Lydia asked, surprised and a little pleased at the notion.

  “And last of all,” he yelled, “tell that old son of a bitch to leave the bedroom door open when he’s in there with Little Pauly! Better still, keep the kid out of there!”

  “You pig,” she said.

  “What are you telling Uncle?” Little Paul whispered, his head twisting at the keyhole in a futile attempt to see more of Tollefson’s bedroom.

  “Don’t you listen, Uncle Carl,” he muttered fiercely. “Don’t you listen to him.”

  Through the keyhole the boy could see only part of the room, and that part contained Tollefson’s bed, by which the old man knelt praying, his bare back turned to the door, and the scar, faded by time, a faint letter formed by a timid hand.

  What was out of view, in that portion of the bedroom that contained the unseen wardrobe, toward which Tollefson’s head was beseechingly turned, Little Paul could only imagine.

  The old man and the boy picked their way between the dusty rows of garden vegetables under a stunning August sun, collecting refuse for the pigs. Little Paul trudged along listlessly behind Tollefson, pulling a wagon heaped with old pea vines; tiny, sun-scalded potatoes; beet and carrot tops. Their two shadows, black as pitch, crept over the dry, crumbling soil; shattered on the plant tops shaking in the breeze; squatted, stooped, and stretched.

  Tollefson was admitting to himself he was a sinful man, a deceitful man. For months, ever since the April storm in which he had collapsed, he had known he was incapable of any longer earning his way in the world. His working days were over. He really was an old man, and in his talks with God he had come to realize that he was close to death. Yet he had pretended it was only a matter of time before he regained his strength and left to find work. But this deception was no longer enough. His niece and her husband were becoming impatient with him. Perhaps they would soon invite him to leave.

  Tollefson didn’t want to leave. He was an old man with nowhere to go. A man with no place of his own; no people of his own. All his life he had lived in other men’s houses; played with other men’s children; even, on occasion, slept with other men’s wives before he had come to know Jesus. He was lonely and frightened.

  That was why he had hit on the idea of making Little Paul the beneficiary of his will. He had worked very hard all his life and saved more money than anybody would suspect. Thirty-nine thousand dollars. When he told Lydia what he was going to do, they wouldn’t dare ask him to leave for fear he would take the boy out of his will. What had Jesus said? “Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent?”

  Big Paul might hate his guts, but he wouldn’t deny his son a stake in thirty-nine thousand dollars. He was sure of that.

  Tollefson looked down at Paul grubbing under a tomato plant for wormy fruit. Lydia had told him the child was suffering from bad dreams and nervous diarrhea.

  The boy glanced up at him with his flat, guarded eyes. “Tomorrow will be too hot to kill pigs,” he said out of the blue. Although Little Paul hadn’t phrased his sentence as a question, Tollefson knew it was. For a week the boy had heard his father and Tollefson discuss whether they would soon have “killing weather” – cooler temperatures and a wind to prevent flies swarming on the pigs as they were scalded and gutted.

  “Can’t wait any longer,” said Tollefson matter-of-factly, shading his eyes and studying the glowing blue glaze of the sky. “Your dad made a booking to have the meat cut and wrapped at the locker plant tomorrow afternoon. I’ll have to do the pigs in the morning.” The old man paused, adjusted his shirt sleeves, and then inquired, “Are you going to give me a hand?”

  “It’s too hot to kill pigs,” the boy said sullenly.

  “You got to learn some time,” Tollefson said, “if you want to be a farmer. I to
ld you all along them pigs would be butchered, and your mother told you. You knew it. That’s a farmer’s job to grow things for people to eat. Now, you like bacon, don’t you? Where do you think bacon comes from?”

  “God,” said Little Paul automatically. He thought he’d learned how to please Tollefson.

  His answer took the old man momentarily aback. “Well yes… that’s right. But pigs is what I meant. It comes from pigs. It’s pork. But you’re right. Everything God made, he made for a reason. He made pigs for men to eat.”

  “I’d puke,” said Little Paul vehemently. “I’d puke it all up.”

  Tollefson took off his long-billed cap and peered into it as if he expected to find there an answer to his predicament. “Listen,” he said at last, taking the boy by the shoulders and looking directly into his face, “you got to learn to see things through. Believe me when I tell you it’s the most important thing in life. You can’t feed a pig and keep a pig and grow a pig and then leave the end, the dirty part, for another man to do. You had the fun of it all, and now you don’t want the rest. It isn’t right, Little Paul,” he said. “You got to learn that. Remember when I read you the story of Abraham and Isaac? You didn’t want to hear the end of the story because you thought it didn’t suit. Just the way now you think butchering those pigs doesn’t suit. But it does. There’s nothing finer in God’s eyes than a farmer, because the work he does, it does good for all people. A farmer feeds people and that’s good. Don’t you see?” he pleaded to the pale, intractable face.

  “No.” The boy’s shoulders twisted under his hand. “No.”

  “God wants them pigs butchered,” said Tollefson, trying to make sense of it for the boy. “They won’t feel nothing. I’m a top-notch pig shot. I shot hundreds.”

  “You talk to him,” said the boy, speaking very quickly, his face a strained mask. “You two got secrets from me. I talk and talk but he doesn’t answer me what you got planned for me. I asked and asked and asked. But it’s a secret. Why don’t he tell me!”

  “Who?” said Tollefson, reaching for the boy, alarmed by the fear which had lain in the shallows of the child’s eyes all those months, but which he recognized only then, for the first time.

  “Is he hungry?” implored Little Paul. “Is he hungry? Please, is that how the story ends?”

  What I Learned From Caesar

  THE OLDEST story is the story of flight, the search for greener pastures. But the pastures we flee, no matter how brown and blighted – these travel with us; they can’t be escaped.

  My father was an immigrant. You would think this no penalty in a nation of immigrants, but even his carefully nurtured, precisely colloquial English didn’t spare him much pain. Nor did his marriage to a woman of British stock (as we called it then, before the vicious-sounding acronym Wasp came into use). That marriage should have paid him a dividend of respectability, but it only served to make her suspect in marrying him.

  My father was a lonely man, a stranger who made matters worse by pretending he wasn’t. It’s true that he was familiar enough with his adopted terrain, more familiar than most because he was a salesman. Yet he was never really of it, no matter how much he might wish otherwise. I only began to understand what had happened to him when I, in my turn, left for greener pastures, heading east. I didn’t go so far, not nearly so far as he had. But I also learned that there is a price to be paid. Mine was a trivial one, a feeling of mild unease. At odd moments I betrayed myself and my beginnings; I knew that I lacked the genuine ring of a local. And I had never even left my own country.

  Occasionally I return to the small Saskatchewan town near the Manitoba border where I grew up. To the unpractised eye of an easterner the countryside around that town might appear undifferentiated and monotonous, part and parcel of that great swath of prairie that vacationers drive through, pitying its inhabitants and deploring its restrooms, intent only on leaving it all behind as quickly as possible. But it is just here that the prairie verges on parkland, breaking into rolling swells of land, and here, too, that it becomes a little greener and easier on the eye. There is still more sky than any country is entitled to, and it teases the traveller into believing he can never escape it or find shelter under it. But if your attention wanders from that hypnotic expanse of blue and the high clouds drifting in it, the land becomes more comfortable as prospects shorten, and the mind rests easier on attenuated distances. There is cropland: fields of rye, oats, barley, and wheat; flat, glassy sloughs shining like mirrors in the sun; a solitary clump of trembling poplar; a bluff that gently climbs to nudge the sky.

  When I was a boy it was a good deal bleaker. The topsoil had blown off the fields and into the ditches to form black dunes; the crops were withered and burnt; there were no sloughs because they had all dried up. The whole place had a thirsty look. That was during the thirties when we were dealt a doubly cruel hand of drought and economic depression. It was not a time or place that was kindly to my father. He had come out of the urban sprawl of industrial Belgium some twenty-odd years before, and it was only then, I think, that he was beginning to come to terms with a land that must have seemed forbidding after his own tiny country, so well tamed and marked by man. And then this land played him the trick of becoming something more than forbidding; it became fierce, and fierce in every way.

  It was in the summer of 1931, the summer that I thought was merely marking time before I would pass into high school, that he lost his territory. For as long as I could remember I had been a salesman’s son, and then it ended. The company he worked for began to feel the pinch of the depression and moved to merge its territories. He was let go. So one morning he unexpectedly pulled up at the front door and began to haul his sample cases out of the Ford.

  “It’s finished,” he said to my mother as he flung the cases on to the lawn. “I got the boot. I offered to stay on – strictly commission. He wouldn’t hear of it. Said he couldn’t see fit to starve two men where there was only a living for one. I’d have starved that other sonofabitch out. He’d have had to hump his back and suck the hind tit when I was through with him.” He paused, took off his fedora and nervously ran his index finger around the sweat-band. Clearing his throat, he said, “His parting words were ‘Good luck, Dutchie!’ I should have spit in his eye. Jesus H. Christ himself wouldn’t dare call me Dutchie. The bastard.”

  Offence compounded offence. He thought he was indistinguishable, that the accent wasn’t there. Maybe his first successes as a salesman owed something to his naivete. Maybe in good times, when there was more than enough to go around, people applauded his performance by buying from him. He was a counterfeit North American who paid them the most obvious of compliments, imitation. Yet hard times make people less generous. Jobs were scarce, business was poor. In a climate like that, perceptions change, and perhaps he ceased to be merely amusing and became, instead, a dangerous parody. Maybe that district manager, faced with a choice, could only think of George Vander Elst as Dutchie. Then again, it might have been that my father just wasn’t a good enough salesman. Who can judge at this distance?

  But for the first time my father felt as if he had been exposed. He had never allowed himself to remember that he was a foreigner, or if he had, he persuaded himself he had been wanted. After all, he was a northern European, a Belgian. They had been on the preferred list.

  He had left all that behind him. I don’t even know the name of the town or the city where he was born or grew up. He always avoided my questions about his early life as if they dealt with a distasteful and criminal past that was best forgotten. Never, not even once, did I hear him speak Flemish. There were never any of the lapses you might expect. No pet names in his native language for my mother or myself; no words of endearment which would have had the comfort of childhood use. Not even when driven to one of his frequent rages did he curse in the mother tongue. If he ever prayed, I’m sure it was in English. If a man forgets the cradle language in the transports of prayer, love, and rage – well, it’s forgotten. />
  The language he did speak was, in a sense, letter-perfect, fluent, glib. It was the language of wheeler-dealers, and of the heady twenties, of salesmen, high-rollers, and persuaders. He spoke of people as live-wires, go-getters, self-made men. Hyphenated words to describe the hyphenated life of the seller, a life of fits and starts, comings and goings. My father often proudly spoke of himself as a self-made man, but this description was not the most accurate. He was a remade man. The only two pictures of him which I have in my possession are proof of this.

  The first is a sepia-toned photograph taken, as nearly as I can guess, just prior to his departure from Belgium. In this picture he is wearing an ill-fitting suit, round-toed, clumsy boots, and a cloth cap. The second was taken by a street photographer in Winnipeg. My father is walking down the street, a snap-brim fedora slanting rakishly over one eye. His suit is what must have been considered stylish then – a three-piece pin-stripe – and he is carrying an overcoat casually over one arm. He is exactly what he admired most, a “snappy dresser,” or, since he always had trouble with his p’s, a “snabby dresser.” The clothes, though they mark a great change, aren’t really that important. Something else tells the story.

  In the first photograph my father stands rigidly with his arms folded across his chest, unsmiling. Yet I can see that he is a young man who is hesitant and afraid; not of the camera, but of what this picture-taking means. There is a reason why he is having his photograph taken. He must leave something of himself behind with his family so he will not be forgotten, and carry something away with him so that he can remember. That is what makes this picture touching; it is a portrait of a solitary, an exile.

  In the second picture his face is blunter, fleshier: nothing surprising in that, he is older. But suddenly you realize he is posing for the camera – not in the formal, European manner of the first photograph but in a manner far more unnatural. You see, he is pretending to be entirely natural and unguarded; yet he betrays himself. The slight smile, the squared shoulder, the overcoat draped over the arm, all are calculated bits of a composition. He has seen the camera from a block away. My father wanted to be caught in exactly this negligent, unassuming pose, sure that it would capture for all time his prosperity, his success, his adaptability. Like most men, he wanted to leave a record. And this was it. And if he had coached himself in such small matters, what would he ever leave to chance?