Barnacle Love

by Anthony De Sa

  Then Terri just stopped.

  I lowered my eyes and turned sideways to allow her to pass. She left, as if all she had come down for was a glass of water. She exited into the dim corridor on her way back to bed; my mother followed behind.

  I stayed to clean up the mess. I tried not to look at him lying there; his breath gurgled and rasped when he inhaled. He attempted to lift himself into a sitting position and look around the kitchen. One eye was swollen shut and there was blood smeared across his puffy cheeks. He saw me and raised his head, an invitation to help him. I didn’t move. Only last week, at two o’clock in the morning, I had had to collect him from Wanda’s front garden, up our street. He was completely naked in the cold night, peeing, her dog Poncho barking madly in the yard, snapping at the arc of urine. He hadn’t asked for help then. Tonight he did. I bent down and threw his arm around my shoulder and dragged his clammy body to bed. As I tucked him in I saw my mother’s silhouette move past the bedroom door, heard the click of the basement lights.

  I followed her shadow into the wine cellar. My mother straddled one of the large oak barrels that sat in its wedged wooden bracket. She hung on to a leg of cured ham that dangled from the basement rafter, as she struggled to open the sliding window. The fresh autumn air poured into the room. She bent over the face of the barrel and plucked the cork free. The unfermented wine growled deep within its oaken belly before sputtering and spewing in a steady stream across the concrete floor. Barefooted, she moved to the next barrel and struggled to pull that cork out. And again, till all four barrels emptied themselves in rhythmic gulps.

  She stood in her cotton nightgown that always smelled of sweet talcum powder. Her figure, with its maroon-stained hem, moved toward me. She took my hands then swung her shoulders in an invitation to dance. We danced through the streams of ruby red, splattering each other, twirling and spinning. My feet began to stick and I grew dizzy with her laughter.

  “Stop, Mãe … I said stop!”

  She had shut herself off from my voice but sensed my reluctance as I slowed down. Lacking a willing partner, she dropped my hands. She danced and twirled a few times more in a solitary and unconvincing flourish. For a moment she looked uncertain of where she was. She squatted over the puddle of wine and covered her face with her hands. There she sat, where the four streams of wine met, in the sweet smell of grape juice, amid the sounds of her sobs and the thin trickle dropping down the drainage hole.

  “Go to bed now, filho.” She swept her forearm across her face, moving the wisps of hair that stuck to her glowing forehead. “To bed, filho. I’ll clean up.”

  Usually, on a Saturday morning I awoke to the smell of Lemon Pledge paste and the steady hum of my mother buffing the kitchen floor. This morning the house was silent. I faintly remember my mother peeking into my room; she used words like hospital and stitches. On my way down to the kitchen I thought I was alone, but saw my father’s lump under the covers of his bed.

  I grabbed a Joe Louis from the pantry and headed to the basement. How had she left things? The concrete floor was spotless, scoured and bleached. The stoppers had been placed back in the now hollow barrels. Only the sweet smell of unfermented wine lingered. The frosted window remained open. I climbed on top of a barrel and breathed in cold blowing wind that seared my lungs, then shut the window.

  My father barely got out of bed that day. He left his room to pee or to pour himself a glass of milk mixed with a raw egg. I’m sure he thought that might cure what ailed him, his sore head and bruised back. The events of the previous evening were forgotten. I knew this because he had forced a painful smile when we met in the hallway and asked, “Where’s your mother?” through a yawn.

  I went to bed early, five o’clock. I made a sort of ritual of the event. I threw my flannel pajamas in the oven at two hundred degrees for only a couple of minutes, then quickly jumped into them and ran up to my bed and under my covers. I was fifteen and it was the sort of thing my mother used to do for us every Saturday night after our weekly baths. Usually, I’d be embarrassed, catching myself smiling with the warmth and pure joy that enveloped me. Tonight the joy was missing.

  I was content to just sleep, but that eluded me also. I could hear my mother come up the stairs and move around the house. She entered my room then left, a trail of herbal smoke swirling after her.

  I waited until I knew she had covered the whole house with her burnt offering, then followed her upstairs to the attic. She hunched over her workspace, her knees cramped next to the iron sewing machine that hung under the table. Aware of my presence, she motioned with her elbow to take a seat on the old chair that was once my grandmother Theresa’s. I had found my mother on many a morning sleeping in this very chair. There had been a time when I felt I could swim in it. Now, I could barely cross my legs, the adult way—a habit I had only recently forced myself to pick up. I sat with my knees curled under my chin.

  On the windowsill sat the fisherman my mother had been working on, his little tin hat tilted on the side of his head, his arms dangling over the edge of the small boat with Avé painted on its side. He held on to a long wire of dangling fish made from the simple twist of pop can tabs. Beside him, leaning against the windowpane, the blue-eyed boy seemed eager to ride his bicycle. The knees of his thinly wired legs would move with the slightest breath of air. My mother had made other whirligigs before; they were scattered across our vegetable garden, different colored birds whose wings turned freely on a simple rod, their beaks pointing into the wind.

  “God sees everything,” she said.

  “How do you know?” I challenged. She stopped painting a dress on a small cutout of a girl, whose only completed feature was her hair.

  “The wind tells me so,” she said, “and time.”

  She turned to continue painting. God had loomed over our home and in our neighborhood; our lives and culture were controlled by what He represented, and I had believed.

  On Monday my mother left early for work. I was home alone with my father, who hadn’t worked in nine months. He had lost his license for driving drunk. He had been dumping some clean fill at the Leslie Spit and had almost run his dump truck into the lake. According to the police officer, when they towed the truck back onto the road, he lay in the front seat snoring, the cab filled to his waist with lake water.

  I scrambled to get ready for school, but the sounds that came from his room frightened me. He was pleading with someone. Reluctantly, I stepped into his room and crept up beside him. He was huddled in his sheets, shaking uncontrollably.

  He turned to face me, his eyes now bruised; his cut lip was healing, a dark scab had slowly formed. His head was dotted with small beads of sweat. His teeth rattled. His cool blue eyes darted across my face, searching for something recognizable. I could smell stale pee in his damp sheets, and when he opened his mouth traces of metal and sulfur rose from deep inside him. He grasped my arm, dug his nails in.

  “She want to kill me … the black lady has a knife, filho. Run! Call the police. She want to kill me.” He covered his head with the sheets and howled the same warnings from beneath his pillow.

  “There’s no one here.”

  “You fucken crazy. You kill me, you sonofabitch.” Every muscle in his neck strained, his eyes bulged out of their sockets as his body squirmed in awkward spasms.

  I ran to the phone in the hallway. What happens in this house, stays in this house. I dialed my mother at St. Michael’s Hospital, and at the first ring placed the receiver back in its cradle. His groans boomed through the corridor. I lifted the receiver again, the blood swooshing across my ears, and dialed.

  “Hello—” I paused for only a second. “I need an ambulance—55 Palmerston Avenue … It’s my father … My name is Antonio … his son.”

  I sat on the chair beside the telephone in the hallway. They said they’d take him to Toronto Western. I could hear their exchanges, caught words like hallucinations, stink, withdrawal, alcoholic. Things were happening so fast.

 
; “Filho, no let me go. They killing me, filho.”

  They tucked the sheets taut under him, his arms stiff by his sides, and strapped him down with leather belts before wheeling him outside.

  “Would you like to ride in the ambulance with us?”

  “No,” I said. I didn’t want the neighbors to see me.

  “They had no room for him in the hospital. They moved him. These are his blankets. Bring them to your father, filho.” A stuffed knapsack lay in the corner of the entrance hallway. Before I could say anything, she handed me an address—16 Ossington Avenue—clearly printed on a torn piece of paper. She kissed my forehead and opened the door for me.

  “I’ll take my bike.”

  It was mid-November and the air was beginning to sting. I pedaled my ten-speed along Queen Street, careful to avoid the streetcar tracks and sewer grates. I sped by Trinity Bellwoods Park and then the Candy Factory before crossing Shaw and the ominous gloom of the mental hospital. Is this where he was? They said they’d be taking him to the hospital, Toronto Western. I stopped and unraveled the piece of paper crushed between my hand and the handlebar. I moved toward Ossington Avenue then turned north, relieved I wouldn’t have to go into the mental hospital. I came to a large blue door that matched the address on the paper. I knocked and a voice came through an intercom grate.

  “I … I’m here to give something to my … Manuel.”

  The door opened with a buzz and I entered a dimly lit space; a mismatch of sofas and chairs with a large console television at the far end, its grainy glare washing over the furniture. A sign hung on the wall behind a counter: TORONTO WEST DETOX CENTRE. A large black man came around the counter and took the bag.

  “Your father’s there.”

  How does he know I’m his son, I thought. He pointed to a reclining chair wedged between two larger sofas. A small figure sat alone. I could see they were all watching Monday Night at the Movies—Charly. I approached slowly. They’re drunks, I thought; the kind I saw on the street with their long beards and tattered clothes who laughed and smoked and drank Aqua Velva while others slept over heating vents or panhandled in store doorways. With every step toward my father the smell of stale cigarettes pushed against my nostrils. He should be in a hospital … not here with these drunks. A toothless woman came toward me and the black man at the door redirected her gently back to the sofa.

  “You can’t stay,” he said in a surprisingly soft voice.

  My father turned and saw me take some reluctant steps toward him. Before I reached him, he tried to get up; his knees buckled and a violent trembling began. He reached for my wrist.

  “Filho. Meu filho. I so cold. They no turn on the heat. I ask and I ask but no one listen to me. Take me home. Casa. Eu quero ir para a nossa casa.”

  I couldn’t remember the last time he had spoken to me in Portuguese. He sounded so vulnerable when he uttered the phrase, the words strung together. He looked so helpless and lost, not the man I remembered as a boy. Tom—that’s what the black man’s name tag read—took hold of my father’s wrist and motioned with his head for me to leave.

  I turned away from my father’s cries to help him, turned my back and ran out the same blue door, punching my way through. I took a deep breath then retched beside my bike.

  I leaned my bike against the garage wall and stepped into my backyard. My sister had come home; she stood behind my mother, delicately braiding her graying hair. I could see the bandage on her hand.

  “Mãe, he wants to come home. We need to bring him home.”

  There was no response. It was cold but I took off my windbreaker and threw off my sweatshirt. I sat on the flagstone walkway that connected the house to the garage and then to the laneway. I kicked off my shoes and flung off my socks. I lay back flat on the path with my arms to my sides and looked up into the dotted sky. Its beauty was in its vastness, places unseen, distances unchallenged.

  Their faces, too, were turned up into the starlit sky. A cool wind began to blow. There was whimsy in their eyes. My mother’s large whirligig rattled atop the flagpole. The girl with the bangs in the painted dress spun in a cartwheel, arms and legs splayed open. Behind her was a figure that looked like Jesus without a beard, dressed all in white with red stains on its hands and robe. The fisherman reeled in his line of fish—the many small fish that he held on his line—before dropping it once again over the side of his small boat named Avé. The boy sat on his bike and pedaled with determination, a need to go somewhere, anywhere. Together, the propellers twirled while the figures worked in their fruitless pantomime.

  MR. WONG PRESENTS JESUS

  MY FATHER BEAMED AS HE held the tickets in the shape of a fan—pick-a-card, any-card. He laid them on the kitchen table with a rap of his knuckles. CN RAIL—Economy: Toronto to Niagara Falls. I had never ridden on a train. The last time we were all together on any kind of trip was when we went to Portugal to bury my grandmother. I was six then and my memories were nothing more than broken scenes: being bathed in half-barrels of cold water, soft butter, dirty feet, long worn faces, heat and sweat and dust, bread torn by hand, animals and blood, laundry soap, outhouses with neat piles of assorted rags, hockey-stick sideburns, Aunt Candy—her red lips framing crooked teeth, my grandmother like a lump of charcoal—cursed and blamed with every small gasp.

  “It’s certainly not B.C.,” I said. I raised my eyes and continued to cross-hatch my sketch. My father rolled up his sleeves and scoured his hands under hot water like a surgeon. A trip to Niagara Falls on Christmas Eve wasn’t exactly the train ride he had been promising all our lives: sweeping across Canada, west to the Rockies. He came back and stood between my mother and me, cleanshaven, looking out the window at an already darkening sky. His white shirt so crisp and fresh. He reminded me of the early black-and-white pictures he had of himself, posing outside Toronto’s city hall in a tailored suit and dark overcoat and fedora. That big smile of his that puffed out his cheeks. Or with his plaid shirts and pleated trousers in the middle of Canada’s wilderness, his foot on top of a bear he had shot dead near the rails in Kenora. Or so he said.

  “What are you drawing?” he asked.

  I continued to dig my pencil into the paper, short quick strokes. “It’s a bird—a dead one.”

  I had found it last week, crumpled against the curb at the foot of Bathurst where I liked to go every so often on my bike to draw or read. I had found a bag in the garbage and brought it home. It was still in the box freezer in the basement, frozen with its broken wing tipped upward and its head tucked under its breast.

  “I no see a bird. I see crazy lines but I no see a bird.”

  “You wouldn’t,” I said.

  “Why you no do math? I no come to this country for you to make pictures of birds.”

  My ears were burning. He knew I wanted to draw. Even though my teachers told him I was special, had a real gift, he always snorted his anger in the same way. “Business,” he’d say, “he will be a businessman.”

  I spent most of my time in my room with the radio cranked, a bulging capsule of bass.

  My mother sat beside him, not close, but near enough that she could reach to brush his leg. He lowered his head and she whispered something.

  “Very nice, filho,” he said, straightening himself.

  He hadn’t had a drink in over a year now, had found work as a custodian at the Eaton Centre.

  “Too late,” I said. I scooped up my charcoal and pencils, flipped my sketch pad shut, and pushed my chair away from the table.

  “He wants this for us, and he’s been so good,” she had said when my sister had blurted, “I won’t go.” My sister was twenty and saw herself as a woman who couldn’t be led any longer; she would make decisions for herself. But a private conversation with my mother had made her pack her bag and she sat slumped next to me trying to read a trashy novel.

  Every time a relative of ours came to Canada, Niagara Falls was the first place we’d take them. My father got a kick out of hearing their “oohs”
and their “ahhh, mas que maravilha.” And I knew he measured the success of the trip by the number of camera clicks as they posed holding on to the leaves of a branch, knee-highs flattening the hair on their legs or men in shiny suits on a hot day. My father took great pride in possessing the photographic precision needed to create the illusion of holding the Skyline Tower in their hands like the Statue of Liberty.

  They would all come from Portugal smelling of salt and damp cotton, like the end of my sleeve I would catch myself sucking when I was a kid. They lived with us for the first little while; “just until they get their feet on the ground” was what my mother used to say, without the slightest trace of her sticky Portuguese accent. They all stayed rent-free for a couple of months, but never much more than that; there was always another letter informing my father his sponsorship had been approved by Canadian immigration officials, announcing that another family member was waiting with fresh passport in hand.

  It became a lonely place when our big house on Palmerston Avenue remained empty. Rooms were cleaned with water and bleach, sheets were changed, before everything was covered with plastic or drop cloths and the doors were shut and locked, sealed like a vacuum, waiting for the next relative.

  All that had stopped when I was about ten. Now that they were here, the relatives hardly visited. My father had said some awful things to them, hurtful things. For the most part we were alone and had only each other.

  During the train ride, few words were exchanged. My mother smiled and squeezed my father’s arm every time he looked her way. Our sullen expressions and sighs of boredom went ignored. My father excused himself and announced he needed to go to the bathroom. He walked down the aisle, steadying himself on the backs of the seats.