That was why he was so ashamed when he came home that summer. There was the particular shame of having lost his job, a harder thing for a man then than it might be today. There was the shame of knowing that sooner or later we would have to go on relief, because being a lavish spender he had no savings. But there was also the shame of a man who suddenly discovers that all his lies were transparent, and everything he thought so safely hidden had always been in plain view. He had been living one of those dreams. The kind of dream in which you are walking down the street, meeting friends and neighbours, smiling and nodding, and when you arrive at home and pass a mirror you see for the first time you are stark naked. He was sure that behind his back he had always been Dutchie. For a man with so much pride a crueller epithet would have been kinder; to be hated gives a man some kind of status. It was the condescension implicit in that diminutive, its mock playfulness, that made him appear so undignified in his own eyes.
And for the first time in my life I was ashamed of him. He didn’t have the grace to bear an injustice, imagined or otherwise, quietly. At first he merely brooded, and then like some man with a repulsive sore, he sought pity by showing it. I’m sure he knew that he could only offend, but he was under a compulsion to justify himself. He began with my mother by explaining, where there was no need for explanation, that he had had his job taken from him for no good reason. However, there proved to be little satisfaction in preaching to the converted, so he carried his tale to everyone he knew. At first his references to his plight were tentative and oblique. The responses were polite but equally tentative and equally oblique. This wasn’t what he had hoped for. He believed that the sympathy didn’t measure up to the occasion. So his story was told and retold, and each time it was enlarged and embellished until the injustice was magnified beyond comprehension. He made a damn fool of himself. This was the first sign, although my mother and I chose not to recognize it.
In time everyone learned my father had lost his job for no good reason. And it wasn’t long before the kids of the fathers he had told his story to were following me down the street chanting, “No good reason. No good reason.” That’s how I learned my family was a topical joke that the town was enjoying with zest. I suppose my father found out too, because it was about that time he stopped going out of the house. He couldn’t fight back and neither could I. You never can.
After a while I didn’t leave the house unless I had to. I spent my days sitting in our screened verandah reading old copies of Saturday Evening Post and Maclean’s. I was content to do anything that helped me forget the heat and the monotony, the shame and the fear, of that longest of summers. I was thirteen then and in a hurry to grow up, to press time into yielding the bounty I was sure it had in keeping for me. So I was killing time minute by minute with those magazines. I was to enter high school that fall and that seemed a prelude to adulthood and independence. My father’s misfortunes couldn’t fool me into believing that maturity didn’t mean the strength to plunder at will. So when I found an old Latin grammar of my mother’s I began to read that too. After all, Latin was the arcane language of the professions, of lawyers and doctors, those divinities owed immediate and unquestioning respect. I decided I would become either one, because respect could never be stolen from them as it had been from my father.
That August was the hottest I can remember. The dry heat made my nose bleed at night, and I often woke to find my pillow stiff with blood. The leaves of the elm tree in the front yard hung straight down on their stems; flies buzzed heavily, their bodies tip-tapping lazily against the screens, and people passing the house moved so languidly they seemed to be walking in water. My father, who had always been careful about his appearance, began to come down for breakfast barefoot, wearing only a vest undershirt and an old pair of pants. He rarely spoke, but carefully picked his way through his meal as if it were a dangerous obstacle course, only pausing to rub his nose thoughtfully. I noticed that he had begun to smell.
One morning he looked up at me, laid his fork carefully down beside his plate and said, “I’ll summons him.”
“Who?”
“Who do you think?” he said scornfully. “The bastard who fired me. He had no business calling me Dutchie. That’s slander.”
“You can’t summons him.”
“I can,” he said emphatically. “I’m a citizen. I’ve got rights. I’ll go to law. He spoiled my good name.”
“That’s not slander.”
“It is.”
“No it isn’t.”
“I’ll sue the bastard,” he said vaguely, looking around to appeal to my mother, who had left the room. He got up from the table and went to the doorway. “Edith,” he called, “tell your son I’ve got the right to summons that bastard.”
Her voice came back faint and timid, “I don’t know, George.”
He looked back at me. “You’re in the same boat, sonny. And taking sides with them don’t save you. When we drown we all drown together.”
“I’m not taking sides,” I said indignantly. “Nobody’s taking sides. It’s facts. Can’t you see…,” but I didn’t get a chance to finish. He left, walked out on me. I could hear his steps on the stairway, tired, heavy steps. There was so much I wanted to say. I wanted to make it plain that being on his side meant saving him from making a fool of himself again. I wanted him to know he could never win that way. I wanted him to win, not lose. He was my father. But he went up those steps, one at a time, and I heard his foot fall distinctly, every time. Beaten before he started, he crawled back into bed. My mother went up to him several times that day, to see if he was sick, to attempt to gouge him out of that room, but she couldn’t. It was only later that afternoon, when I was reading in the verandah, that he suddenly appeared again, wearing only a pair of undershorts. His body shone dully with sweat, his skin looked grey and soiled.
“They’re watching us,” he said, staring past me at an empty car parked in the bright street.
Frightened, I closed my book and asked who was watching us.
“The relief people,” he said tiredly. “They think I’ve got money hidden somewhere. They’re watching me, trying to catch me with it. The joke’s on them. I got no money.” He made a quick, furtive gesture that drew attention to his almost naked body, as if it were proof of his poverty.
“Nobody is watching us. That car’s empty.”
“Don’t take sides with them,” he said, staring through the screen. I thought someone from one of the houses across the street might see him like that, practically naked.
“The neighbours’ll see,” I said, turning my head to avoid looking at him.
“See what?” he asked, surprised.
“You standing like that. Naked almost.”
“There’s nothing they can do. A man’s home is his castle. That’s what the English say, isn’t it?”
And he went away laughing.
Going down the hallway, drawing close to his door that always stood ajar, what did I hope? To see him dressed, his trousers rolled up to mid-calf to avoid smudging his cuffs, whistling under his breath, shining his shoes? Everything as it was before? Yes. I hoped that. If I had been younger then and still believed that frogs were turned into princes with a kiss, I might even have believed it could happen. But I didn’t believe. I only hoped. Every time I approached his door (and that was many times a day, too many), I felt the queasy excitement of hope.
It was always the same. I would look in and see him lying on the tufted pink bedspread, naked or nearly so, gasping for breath in the heat. And I always thought of a whale stranded on a beach because he was such a big man. He claimed he slept all day because of the heat, but he only pretended to. He could feel me watching him and his eyes would open. He would tell me to go away, or bring him a glass of water; or, because his paranoia was growing more marked, ask me to see if they were still in the street. I would go to the window and tell him, yes, they were. Nothing else satisfied him. If I said they weren’t, his jaw would shift from side to sid
e unsteadily and his eyes would prick with tears. Then he imagined more subtle and intricate conspiracies.
I would ask him how he felt.
“Hot,” he’d say, “I’m always hot. Can’t hardly breathe. Damn country,” and turn on his side away from me.
My mother was worried about money. There was none left. She asked me what to do. She believed women shouldn’t make decisions.
“You’ll have to go to the town office and apply for relief,” I told her.
“No, no,” she’d say, shaking her head. “I couldn’t go behind his back. I couldn’t do that. He’ll go himself when he feels better. He’ll snap out of it. It takes a little time.”
In the evening my father would finally dress and come downstairs and eat something. When it got dark he’d go out into the yard and sit on the swing he’d hung from a limb of our Manitoba maple years before, when I was a little boy. My mother and I would sit and watch him from the verandah. I felt obligated to sit with her. Every night as he settled himself onto the swing she would say the same thing. “He’s too big. It’ll never hold him. He’ll break his back.” But the swing held him up and the darkness hid him from the eyes of his enemies, and I like to think that made him happy, for a time.
He’d light a cigarette before he began to swing, and then we’d watch its glowing tip move back and forth in the darkness like a beacon. He’d flick it away when it was smoked, burning a red arc in the night, showering sparks briefly, like a comet. And then he’d light another and another, and we’d watch them glow and swing in the night.
My mother would lean over to me and say confidentially, “He’s thinking it all out. It’ll come to him, what to do.”
I never knew whether she was trying to reassure me or herself. At last my mother would get to her feet and call to him, telling him she was going up to bed. He never answered. I waited a little longer, believing that watching him I kept him safe in the night. But I always gave up before he did and went to bed too.
The second week of September I returned to school. Small differences are keenly felt. For the first time there was no new sweater, or unsharpened pencils, or new fountain pen whose nib hadn’t spread under my heavy writing hand. The school was the same school I had gone to for eight years, but that day I climbed the stairs to the second floor that housed the high school. Up there the wind moaned more persistently than I remembered it had below, and intermittently it threw handfuls of dirt and dust from the schoolyard against the windows with a gritty rattle.
Our teacher, Mrs. MacDonald, introduced herself to us, though she needed no introduction since everyone knew who she was – she had taught there for over ten years. We were given our texts and it cheered me a little to see I would have no trouble with Latin after my summer’s work. Then we were given a form on which we wrote a lot of useless information. When I came to the space which asked for Racial Origin I paused, and then, out of loyalty to my father, numbly wrote in “Canadian.”
After that we were told we could leave. I put my texts away in a locker for the first time – we had had none in public school – but somehow it felt strange going home from school empty-handed. So I stopped at the library door and went in. There was no school librarian and only a few shelves of books, seldom touched. The room smelled of dry paper and heat. I wandered around aimlessly, taking books down, opening them, and putting them back. That is, until I happened on Caesar’s The Gallic Wars. It was a small, thick book that nestled comfortably in the hand. I opened it and saw that the left-hand pages were printed in Latin and the right-hand pages were a corresponding English translation. I carried it away with me, dreaming of more than proficiency in Latin.
When I got home my mother was standing on the front step, peering anxiously up and down the street.
“Have you seen your father?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Why?”
She began to cry. “I told him all the money was gone. I asked him if I could apply for relief. He said he’d go himself and have it out with them. Stand on his rights. He took everything with him. His citizenship papers, baptismal certificate, old passport, bank book, everything. I said, ‘Everyone knows you. There’s no need.’ But he said he needed proof. Of what? He’ll cause a scandal. He’s been gone for an hour.”
We went into the house and sat in the living-room. “I’m a foolish woman,” she said. She got up and hugged me awkwardly. “He’ll be all right.”
We sat a long time listening for his footsteps. At last we heard someone come up the walk. My mother got up and said, “There he is.” But there was a knock at the door.
I heard them talking at the door. The man said, “Edith, you better come with me. George is in some trouble.”
My mother asked what trouble.
“You just better come. He gave the town clerk a poke. The constable and doctor have him now. The doctor wants to talk to you about signing some papers.”
“I’m not signing any papers,” my mother said.
“You’d better come, Edith.”
She came into the living-room and said to me, “I’m going to get your father.”
I didn’t believe her for a minute. She put her coat on and went out.
She didn’t bring him home. They took him to an asylum. It was a shameful word then, asylum. But I see it in a different light now. It seems the proper word now, suggesting as it does refuge, a place to hide.
I’m not sure why all this happened to him. Perhaps there is no reason anyone can put their finger on, although I have my ideas.
But I needed a reason then. I needed a reason that would lend him a little dignity, or rather, lend me a little dignity; for I was ashamed of him out of my own weakness. I needed him to be strong, or at least tragic. I didn’t know that most people are neither.
When you clutch at straws, anything will do. I read my answer out of Caesar’s The Gallic Wars, the fat little book I had carried home. In the beginning of Book I he writes, “Of all people the Belgae are the most courageous…” I read on, sharing Caesar’s admiration for a people who would not submit but chose to fight and see glory in their wounds. I misread it all, and bent it until I was satisfied. I reasoned the way I had to, for my sake, for my father’s. What was he but a man dishonoured by faceless foes? His instincts could not help but prevail, and like his ancestors, in the end, on that one day, what could he do but make the shadows real, and fight to be free of them?
Drummer
YOU’D THINK my old man was the Pope’s nephew or something if you’d seen how wild he went when he learned I’d been sneaking off Sundays to Faith Baptist Church. Instead of going to eleven o’clock Mass like he figured I was.
Which is kind of funny. Because although Mom is solid R.C. – eight o’clock Mass and saying a rosary at the drop of a hat – nobody ever accused Pop of being a religious fanatic by no means. He goes to confession regular like an oil change, every five thousand miles, or Easter, whichever comes first.
Take the Knights of Columbus. He wouldn’t join those guys for no money. Whenever Mom starts in on him about enlisting he just answers back that he can’t afford the outlay on armour and where’d we keep a horse? Which is his idea of a joke. So it isn’t exactly as if he was St. Joan of Arc himself to go criticizing me.
And Pop wouldn’t have been none the wiser if it wasn’t for my older brother Gene, the prick. Don’t think I don’t know who told. But I can’t expect nothing different from that horse’s ass.
So, as I was saying, my old man didn’t exactly take it all in stride. “Baptists! Baptists! I’m having your head examined. Do you hear me? I’m having it examined! Just keep it up and see if I don’t, you crazy little pecker. They roll in the aisles. Baptists, for chrissakes!”
“I been three times already and nobody rolled in an aisle once.”
“Three times? Three times? Now it all comes out. Three, eh?” He actually hits himself in the forehead with the heel of his palm. Twice. “Jesus Christ Almighty, I’m blessed with a son like this? What’
s the matter with you? Why can’t you ever do something I can understand?”
“Like wrecking cars?” This is a swift kick in the old fun sack. Pop’s just getting over Gene’s totalling off the first new car he’s bought in eight years. A 1966 Chevy Impala.
“Shut your smart mouth. Don’t go dragging your brother into this. Anyway, what he done to the car was accidental. But not you. Oh no, you marched into that collection of religious screwballs, holy belly-floppers, and linoleum-beaters under your own steam. On purpose. For God’s sake, Billy, that’s no religion that – it’s exercise. Stay away from them Baptists.”
“Can’t,” I says to him.
“Can’t? Can’t? Why the hell not?”
“Matter of principle.”
They teach us that in school, matters of principle. I swear it’s a plot to get us all slaughtered the day they graduate us out the door. It’s their revenge, see? Here we are reading books in literature class about some banana who’s only got one oar in the water to start with, and then he pops it out worrying about principles. Like that Hamlet, or what’s his name in A Tale of Two Cities. Ever notice how many of those guys are alive at the end of those books they teach us from?
“I’ll principle you,” says the old man.
The only teacher who maybe believes all that crock of stale horseshit about principles is Miss Clark, who’s fresh out of wherever they bake Social Studies teachers. She’s got principles on the brain. For one thing, old Clarkie has pretty nearly wallpapered her room with pictures of that Negro, Martin Luther King, and some character who’s modelling the latest in Wabasso sheets and looks like maybe he’d kill for a hamburger – Gandhi is his name – and that hairy old fart Tolstoy, who wrote the books you need a front-end loader to lift. From what Clarkie tells us, I gather they’re what you call nonviolent shit-disturbers.
Man Descending Page 9
