by Kyp Harness
At least one time, though, his acting this way was more to do with physical pain than with the townhouses and identical split-level homes being constructed all around us. He came down with an abscessed tooth and had to go to the dentist and get it drained of pus. Off work for the day, he stopped at the club after the dentist with his friend Frank Ostachuk, and they came clattering in the door just after me and my brother came home from school. They sat at the kitchen table drinking and smoking, and I came in marvelling at the strange sight of the men there in the late afternoon and asked my dad how his tooth was.
“How do you think?” he asked as he displayed his swollen cheek for me to see.
Mom came home and said, “I see you guys have been helpin’ Dirk forget his tooth,” and she started to get dinner and asked Dad if he should be drinking while taking the pills the dentist had given him for his tooth. They started arguing, and Frank Ostachuk came out to the living room where we were watching The Brady Bunch and silently smoked his pipe, and I went back to the kitchen because I remembered that tonight was Parents Night at our school, and Mom said, “Oh, that’s right,” and looked over at Dad and said, “How are you gonna go in the state you’re in?”
By this time Dad was holding his head and moaning with real pain, but somehow it seemed warped and deformed by the amount he’d drunk, as if his feelings were passing through a filter that made them bigger but at the same time blurred them, made them crude and block-like and fuzzy, and we had supper, Mom making friendly talk with Frank Ostachuk, and we all ate except Dad, who sat drinking, and after when Frank Ostachuk rejoined my brother and me in the living room while Mom got ready for Parents Night, I crept back to the kitchen to see how Dad was doing just in time to see him standing by the counter and slamming his hand down on it. To my horror he burst into tears, grimacing as he sobbed with a strange, high-pitched sound.
I ran back to Frank Ostachuk who sat smoking his pipe, and hardly able to form the words with my mouth, I said, “Mr. Ostachuk, something’s wrong with my dad—he’s crying.” Not nearly as fast as I wanted, Frank Ostachuk stirred himself and slowly padded out to the kitchen and put his hand on Dad’s arm.
“I’m alright, Frank,” Dad sobbed. “I’m alright.”
Mom came out and said he was in no condition to go to Parents Night, and he said no, no, no, he’ll go, he didn’t want to let the kids down, and so Frank Ostachuk left and Dad drank more of the drink that wasn’t his usual beer, and we went out and got into the car, rumbling through the countryside till we got to the school, unusually alive with golden lights in all the nighttime windows, people visible in the classrooms even from the road, parents standing in the aisles, the cars parked all around the building over the hopscotch and four-square marks on the asphalt.
My brother and I watched Dad not just for the way he was acting but also for the pain the tooth was giving him, the side of his face swollen up as he walked slowly into the school with a sense of being duty bound and grimly living up to his responsibilities, and down the hallway as the parents of various children that he knew from the community or from the barbershop passing by, and him pausing to greet them with an over-friendliness that had his hand leaping up into the air to greet them and his laugh not coming from a real place but from an idea of what he now believed approximated good humour, and I looked from his lopsided grin to their faces to see if they knew, and mostly they bid hello to him in a regular way, and chuckled as he hazarded an irreverent joke as we walked down the hallway of the school, and he now seemed to waver as we walked into Jason’s classroom and we spoke to his teacher, her face taking on a solemn cast as Dad greeted her and they talked of Jason’s math, and he expounded on the difference between math when he was a kid and math now, and she nodded, and he talked about his tooth and how it was infected and they had to drain the pus, and he swayed on his feet and it struck me that Jason’s teacher thought that this was how my dad actually was, that he was mentally slow and had to be patronized and listened to as a courtesy you extend to someone because you are a good person, and it was her job to listen to the concerns of the parents of her students no matter what handicaps they may have, and Dad was telling her about when he was a student and in the midst of one of his most florid pronouncements a little drop of spit came out and landed on the edge of her desk, and though he was unaware of it, I wondered if the teacher saw it, and I looked up to her face and saw it trained upon the tiny bead on the corner of her desk, which she looked at for a moment with no expression, or rather the same expression she had when looking at Dad’s face, so that it didn’t change as she took her attention from the bead and moved it back up to him as he finished with a joke and she smiled and chuckled briefly to show that she knew it was a joke and then we walked from the classroom down the hall, Dad saying, “She’s nice, huh, Jason? Not bad lookin’, either!”
We were making our way to my classroom, me dreading Mrs. Winchell for what she might say since she hated me, her doorway appearing with its nameplate where I used to cover some of the letters so it read Mrs. Hell, my dad lurching beside me and groaning as he pressed his fingers to his swollen jaw, and me seeing some of my classmates emerging from the room with their parents as we approached, some of the kids smiling at me, and some of the meaner ones who ignored me, and the other ones who smirked derisively at me, but we were all checking out each other’s parents, and some of the kids simply stared with wonder at my dad, who moaned a bit from the pain in his tooth as he came into the room, his eye squinted up belligerently as he looked around at the kids’ paintings on the walls, and there was Mrs. Winchell with her black helmet-like hair, her tiny eyes behind her glasses and her mask-like face, its muscles frozen, only roused to action by an apparently intermittent electric zap running coldly through it, the wrinkles at the sides of her mouth downturned in blunt disapproval even when she smiled, as she did now, extending her hand to Mom and Dad, smiling a smile that wasn’t a smile but only a token signifying she knew that she was supposed to smile.
“Now I know Tim don’t have a problem with drawing and art,” Dad was saying. “It’s those other subjects like math we got to watch him on!” I looked from Dad’s careful movements of his mouth which showed that talking for him now was a treacherous exercise akin to maintaining one’s balance on an uneven and shifting terrain, and I looked over to Mrs. Winchell watching him, her tiny eyes taking him in behind her glasses like a scientist through a microscope, and as Dad went on, encouraged by the sound of his voice and her interest, his words fell into the rhythm they sometimes did where he pronounced his words as if they were much bigger and more impressive than they actually were, and his hand gestures, similarly encouraged, shot out and presented the propositions he was speaking of with unnecessary and exaggerated drama.
“Now when I was in school they taught long division in a certain way, but now I guess they figured out this different way to do it, they must’ve figured it out better,” and he cocked his head to one side and listened with some severity to her response, the elbow of one arm cradled into his hand as his other hand came up to touch his cheek in a thoughtful manner but also to rest upon the swollenness.
I watched Mrs. Winchell as she tendered her response, answering with what for her was a rising and diligent passion for the subject she excelled in, her voice like a key fitting into a lock, its unmusical stubbornness coming out with a metallic complacency for the fact the rules would never change, and in this inhuman security she staked her claim, and was only too happy to engage in all the conversations in which the only subject was that the rules never changed, and whose conclusions could only be that the rules never changed, and all the while I was glad because she wasn’t talking about how I cried because I couldn’t understand the math, or how I drew stupid pictures on my notebooks, or how I shouldn’t even be in her class and should be in a special school. No, she was happy to talk of how the methods of teaching long division had changed, and as she was doing so she seemed not to notice my dad’s screwed-up eye or how his expression was ble
ared and blurry and out of sync with what they were saying, and she didn’t notice how cautiously he was pronouncing his words even as his voice grew louder, and that even with that cautiousness the words came out wrong, or his sentences seemed to be missing words, or his words were missing syllables, like those neon signs where some of the letters are burnt out.
Now he was somehow talking of his abscessed tooth again, and she was nodding and something in her fed on this subject too, the subject of pain and suffering which caused her to narrow her eyes in interest and hasten to his words. “Yes, they can be quite painful, my husband had one of those,” she observed with what seemed to be wry satisfaction, and as Dad explained with glazed vividness the procedure of draining the pus, her frozen face was trained on his like an animal on food, and as his acting out the way various dental problems were dealt with attained an energetic theatricality, I realized that his simulations of conversational good cheer that rang so painfully false to me were entirely captivating to Mrs. Winchell as she nodded and waited to share her story of dental woe. She was utterly engaged and looked on my father and his over-the-top gestures with rapt interest and even admiration—in some essential way she connected with my dad in this mood as she connected with little else. She was alive with a respect that even overflowed a bit onto me as we parted and she allowed, with a new tolerance toward me: “Well, Tim’s coming along.”
We left the classroom and continued down the hall, and my dad’s hand went to his swollenness again as he grunted, “Jee-sus Christ,” and Mom went, “Shhh!” There in front of his office as we filed up the hall was Mr. Gosland, his bald dome under the nighttime fluorescent lights entirely living up to his moniker of Shiner, Shiner, Forty-niner. He spotted us and identified me as his “in-house cartoonist” with a chuckle, and he knew my dad from the old barbershop in Point Edward, and so he invited us all into his office to look at some arrowheads and other archeological artifacts that had been unearthed on his property, proudly displaying the arrowheads and watching my father as he went into a lengthy and slurring explanation of the arrowheads he’d found as a boy.
As I had with the other teachers, I watched Mr. Gosland to see if he knew and it seemed to me he did not, his rust-coloured eyebrows dipping up and down behind the upper frame of his spectacles as he followed Dad’s emphatic story, the muscles around his mouth, the movement of his lips beneath the bristles of his red moustache forming a friendly and welcoming expression as he reacted to the twists and turns of Dad’s tale, and I thought of how a week before I’d gotten into trouble for pulling Mary Hiemstra’s ponytail on the bus to school, how the truth of it was that we were both fighting back and forth, but the grade eights who were assigned to bus patrol, wearing their yellow bands, had decided to take Mary and me to the principal’s office, not because what I did was so bad, but because, as I heard the grade eights say as we walked into the school, by taking kids to the principal’s office they could get out of French, which they hated, and when we were all in Mr. Gosland’s office they stood accusing me, and Mr. Gosland stared sternly at me, and though it was true that I did pull Mary Hiemstra’s ponytail, it wasn’t the same as the way it was being said, and I knew the real reason we were there was because the grade eights wanted to miss French, but I couldn’t say that.
The grade eights looked at me threateningly, and in stifled rage I cried, unable to explain, and Mr. Gosland took my tears as remorse and pulled me to him, his arm around me holding me to his chest, the buttons of his jacket against my face, comforting me in what he thought was my being sorry but he did not understand that my tears were of fury at the injustice of not being heard, just like he didn’t understand now: a grinning, willing audience of my dad’s warped performance, putting in his own comments about the tribes of Shankton County and reacting to my dad’s grandiose speechifying with amiable enthusiasm.
The conversation turned to Mr. Gosland’s chipmunk in his terrarium, and Dad looked at the rodent and proclaimed that it reminded him of the rats he and his friends used to go hunting for down by the riverfront. “We’d throw somethin’ in there to get ’em movin’ around, and we’d go shittin’ around…” He paused to lick some excess saliva from his lips and in that strange and awful moment I looked from my father’s lips which had just said “shittin’” over to Mr. Gosland’s face, which at the pronunciation of that word dropped from its receptive friendly interest into a dismayed frown, his mouth sagging and pulling down the bristles of his moustache, and as I watched, in that brief interval that seemed to last an eternity in which my father had sworn at my public school principal in my public school principal’s office, in that disapproving eon in which Mr. Gosland looked with a sad, almost hurt disappointment which almost can’t comprehend that such words exist, much less are spoken, I felt an apocalyptic dread flowing across my stomach, until my father continued, correcting himself, saying, “shootin’ around,” at which point Mr. Gosland’s features perked up again into happy receptiveness, his face relaxing into its former smiles, having been reassured that all was right with the world.
Out into the car I thought of how Mr. Gosland couldn’t tell, and Mrs. Smitchell too, and how they didn’t know and would never know, and riding home with Dad holding his swollen jaw in the front seat as Mom drove, groaning a bit since we’d left his painkillers at home, and somehow I thought of this again weeks later when we were supposed to go to the Birdtown Fair. It was the biggest fair for miles around, forty miles away, and we only went to it every so often over the years because of the distance, and my brother and I were excited when our parents said we were going because of that, and looked forward to the Sunday that had been set aside for it coming up, and our excitement only faltered when we woke up that Sunday morning and I padded to our parents’ bedroom and saw that my dad hadn’t come home the night before.
Now the Sunday was an unhappy one, as we knew better than to ask Mom if we would still be going, and in the bright Sunday morning which seemed to be mocking me with its empty sunniness I sat in a chair by our big front picture window and I looked at the cars passing back and forth on the road before the field of weeds behind which the train tracks with their tower sat, and beyond which the stacks of the refineries soared in their midst, and I wondered if in the cars there were people going to the fair, or to church, and if they were trouble-free and unconcerned, or if, like me, the minutes and hours trudged with leaden weight, and no part of their bodies and thoughts could rest in easeful happiness, and I watched for my dad’s car at the furthest periphery of my vision, where the road disappeared behind the newly raised walls of the subdivision’s construction, my heart racing when I saw a car that looked like it could be his, with a bad comedown when it turned out that it wasn’t, and as the morning passed the promise of the Birdtown Fair moved further and further away, until amazingly, a car that looked like his did come down the road, and unbelievably, the front turning light blinked as it slowly turned into our driveway, slowly, as he always drove slowly when sidling into the driveway to show that however much he drank he was being cautious and careful, or maybe in his state he thought this was how sober people drove, but I found that the slower he drove down the driveway the more trouble he turned out to be, and I sprang from my chair to tell Mom that Dad was home, but she only grunted, and he came in through the kitchen, and yet he seemed to my eye not to be in a bad state, but more tired and rough-voiced, and he sat in a chair he usually didn’t sit in in the living room, and he lit a cigarette of the strange brand he never smoked at any other time, and he said, “Geez, that Bill Hornblower,” and my mom looking at a copy of Chatelaine didn’t even look up at him, but he went on, saying, “That goddamn Bill Hornblower—we had a game of poker goin’ and he just wouldn’t stop! I told him, I says to ’im, ‘You can’t keep the game goin’ just because you’re down some money,’ and he says, ‘No, goddamnit, let’s keep playin’, I got to at least get some of it back,’ and I says, ‘Come on, your wife Marlene’s gonna be waitin’ up for ya, you can’t keep her up
all night,’ and he says, ‘No, goddamnit, I got to keep playin’.”
By this time my brother came out and was lying on the floor at my dad’s feet looking up at him, and we both listened to his story as Mom sat reading her magazine. “So I says to him after a while, ‘You can’t keep Marlene up all night waitin’ for ya, forget the money and go home,’ and he don’t answer me at all, so I go across the street to where him and Marlene live, and I says to her, ‘I can’t get him to go home!’ and she’s sittin’ there just about cryin’. And they got a nice little apartment there overlookin’ the lake, and the sun’s comin’ up—just beautiful—and she says, ‘Dirk, he’s been this way for thirty years—he goes on a tear and he can’t control it—he goes off and it might be for a week, or it might be for a month—never less than a week—and I don’t see him, he don’t call, nothin’. I can’t depend on him for nothin’, I can’t count on him, nothin’ means anything to him except the drinkin’ and gamblin’—and there’s nothin’ I can do about it—and don’t you feel bad, Dirk,’ she says to me. ‘Don’t you feel bad that you can’t bring him home. What he’s got is a sickness—a week, a month, every couple of months, he goes haywire and that’s it, and no one can find him, or talk sense to him even if they can find him—so don’t you feel bad, Dirk, that you can’t bring him home, though I appreciate it that you tried.’
“And I’m lookin’ at her there in her bathrobe sittin’ on her couch, and she looks so frail and sickly, Jesus!” Dad said, taking out another cigarette and lighting it. “You know she had that problem there a year ago, and she says, ‘I just give up waiting for him now, he’s gonna do what he’s gonna do and there ain’t nothing I can do about it,’ and I say, ‘Marlene, Christ, I wish there was something I could do to help ya,’ and she says, ‘There ain’t nothin’ anyone can do,’ and she just sits there by the window with the sun comin’ up over the lake, with her skinny body like there ain’t nothin’ to her—Jesus!” He grimaced and shook his head as if to drive the image from his memory.
