Twenty-Six

by Leo McKay

  He stood on the fifth rung of the ladder, wrapped the noose about his neck. He grabbed hold of the rafter over his head and let his weight off of the ladder, so he swung by his hands from the two-by-six. He hooked his toes under a rung of the ladder and kicked the ladder so far away that it clattered into the wall before striking the floor. He chinned himself, making his eyes level with the two-by-six. His arms were tired from the game he’d played earlier, and the taxed muscles set his arms trembling. The end of the wire, where it was twisted around the rafter, dug into his cheek. He let go.

  Ron Morrison sat at his kitchen table, a bottle of Captain Morgan rum, cap screwed off and nowhere in sight, planted on the table before him. Beside it, a large bottle of Pepsi. In a tall glass near his elbow was a mixture from the two bottles. The twelve-inch TV on the counter was tuned to Hockey Night in Canada. They were announcing their lineup of interviews and commentaries for the second-period intermission.

  Ron looked down at his hands where they were curled around his drink. They were already the hands of a much older man. The hairs that protruded from the backs of the fingers were thick and coarse and black. The fingernails were yellow and thick, like the skin over a rancid pudding.

  On the TV screen, hockey players skated and swerved and shot. The excited announcers described it all. But Ron was too drunk now to follow it. He knew which teams were playing. Now and then the score would register with him. But the mad panning and switching of cameras on the hulking players in their uniforms was blending into mere swirls and flourishes of colour.

  He heard a clatter, and in a moment he realized it had come from the garage. He stood up, both hands on the tabletop to steady himself. He put one foot in the direction of the doorway that led down the few steps to the garage, but he forgot why he’d stood up. He paused a moment, swaying unsteadily with only one hand on the table to hold himself upright, then sat back down.

  Sunday morning Ennis rose just after five thirty. Since the incident with Ziv over the scrapbooks, he had been furious with himself for having thrown away months of work. The memory of his failure to understand and communicate with his son humiliated him and made him angry at himself, his failure. He wanted to be long gone from the house before anyone else was up.

  It was just after six when he walked into the Tim Horton’s in Albion Mines for a cup of coffee and to catch up on the latest gossip. The place was unusually empty, even for so early in the morning. In the far corner, deep in the smoking section, sat Ivor Thompson and the rest of the early-morning crowd, half a dozen men and one woman, most of them middle-aged, all of them puffing on cigarettes as though their lives depended on it. They were huddled close together in a single booth, so intent on whatever they were discussing that they hadn’t even noticed Ennis coming in.

  Ennis ordered his coffee with milk and headed in their direction. As he approached the booth, Ivor Thompson looked up and caught Ennis’s eye. Immediately Thompson shook his head at Ennis and frowned.

  “What carcass are you people chewing on over here,” Ennis said. “I could hear your teeth grinding as soon as I came through the door.”

  “Bad news,” Ivor said. Everyone else at the table looked up now, their faces all marked by the simultaneous sadness and self-importance of people who’ve been first to discover tragedy.

  “Jesus, you’s all look some grim,” Ennis said.

  The only woman at the table, Mary Cameron from up in the prefabs in the Heights, said, “Ronnie Morrison’s son.”

  Ennis knew Alec was dead before she said another word. It was the darkness in her voice as she said the father’s name.

  “The older boy. He’s gone, I guess,” Mary continued. “I guess he hung himself is what they’re saying.”

  “You guess! Jesus! Who’s saying?”

  “I been here since three,” Ivor Thompson said. He took a deep drag of his Export A and tapped the ash into one of the empty coffee cups on the table. “I been trying to quit smoking if you can believe it. I been three days without a smoke and three blessed days without sleep. Round two thirty this morning I give up tossing and turning, keeping the wife awake, she was cursing at me there. Anyway, must have been before three I came in here.

  “Cochrane White was sitting with a newspaper and a large double-double right over there.” He pointed at the booth by the door. “Come about twenty-five after three or so, a call comes across his police radio. He had the damn thing up so loud I heard it plain as day. ‘Go to such and such address in Valley Woods,’ it said. Some teenager’s voice. Isn’t it White’s own boy that works dispatch on the weekends? Anyway, plain as day it says, ‘We got a call from Amanda Morrison says her son Alec hung himself.’ ”

  Ennis went straight to the garbage can, and without realizing what he was doing, he threw his coffee, china cup and all, right into the trash.

  “Ennis!” Mary Cameron called after him, almost laughing with the shock of what Ennis had done. “What the hell are you doing?”

  Ennis did not reply, but walked as though in a trance to his car. He drove directly to the Morrison house in Valley Woods. The Albion Mines police cruiser was parked on the street in front of the house. Every light in the house was on and the door to the garage was criss-crossed with yellow police tape.

  Ennis sat in shock for a long time on the street in front of the Morrison house. Without pulling to the side, he put the car in park and shut off the engine. In a moment an ambulance pulled in behind him and he had to start up the car and make way for it. He pulled ahead and to the side of the street as the ambulance, without siren or flashing lights, pulled quietly into the Morrison driveway. The garage door lifted up, releasing a breath of steam into the cold and breaking through the police tape. Inside the door stood Cochrane White, a stout man dressed in a blue uniform. On the floor of the garage behind him was a sheet-covered body. The only other person visible appeared to be Amanda Morrison, who stood slumped in the doorway that led from the garage into the house.

  Ennis put the car in gear and drove out of Valley Woods and back into town. There were a few more people in Tim Horton’s when he drove by. The people he’d spoken with were still huddled in the corner of the smoking section. He pulled into the driveway of his own yard and looked at the building. No one was up yet. It was still well before seven in the morning. Both of his sons, one in this house, the other in an apartment just up the hill, would still be asleep. And their friend was on his way to the morgue by now.

  Ennis felt himself begin to panic. His limbs jumped involuntarily into action as he slipped the car into reverse and pulled out onto the road. He headed straight for the Highland Square Mall, to the service road at the back. The big garbage Dumpster behind Woolco was where he’d thrown the box of scrapbooks the day Ziv had come home from university. A little more than a week ago, he’d driven off in a huff with the box in the trunk of the car. He’d had no clear plan of action. He had not been able to see that his son was tired. He was angry at Ziv for not understanding that he was only trying to reach out to him. He’d pulled away from the house without a plan, but as soon as he found himself within sight of the mall he drove with a purpose directly to the nearest bin. He’d hoisted to his shoulder the box that contained hours of painstaking work, and heaved it onto the bulging pile of boxboard and Styrofoam already there. In the time since, he had not once thought about the scrapbooks, what he’d done with them or where they might be. But now all his anger and hurt seemed pointless, something he had done to himself.

  He found himself pulling in behind Woolco, parking perpendicular to the Dumpster. The light of morning was just starting to colour the cloud cover above, but big square security lights illuminated the whole service area behind the mall, a long row of nondescript fire doors, each with its own trash receptacle. Some of yesterday’s snow still clung to the ground, most of it up close to the building where the sun did not reach during the day.

  As soon as Ennis flipped back the hatch on the top of the Dumpster, he knew he was too late. Th
e box had been stuffed full when he’d tossed his scrapbooks in here. He could tell that it had been emptied already. Nonetheless, he put a foot up on the big iron hook where the garbage truck took purchase, hoisted himself up to the container’s lip, balanced a moment, took a quick look before himself, then jumped down inside. He knew the box was not here, but he felt desperate now to find it, as though he had no choice but to look. He dug his hands down into the corrugated paper and began turning the trash back onto itself. A foul odour that could only have come from rotting food rose into his nostrils. As he worked away, he grew warm in the confined space, unzipped his winter coat and tossed it up out of the bin toward his car. On the backswing from the throw, his shirt sleeve caught on a bolt and he heard the ripping sound of a seam letting go.

  Just before waking up, Dunya had dreamed a vivid and powerful dream. The images in the dream were unclear and nonsensical, but when she thought about them in the morning, she thought of the dream sensation as moving forward and backward at the same time. She stood on an unpaved street of her childhood, outside her family’s house at the north end of the Red Row. She felt or maybe saw her future, somewhere over the western horizon, luminous as the sun and almost hidden. There were flowers and the fragrances of flowers. There was the smell of tomato plants pungent on her fingers after she had pinched off suckers and unwanted runners and cascades of hard green fruit with no time left in summer to develop. She was a little girl, not even school-age. She turned to look at her house and felt it throbbing with life. Her father was there, her mother, mysterious relatives from the old country. Her future family was there, too: never-spoken-of Ennis, her children, unborn and as yet unthought-of. She entered the house through the back door, and all the people she loved and ever would love were glowing spirits, floating, almost unformed but identifiable in the air. She raised a hand to touch them and they spiralled together in a great human/spirit knot. The knot formed itself into a globe of light, bright as a hot white star, and when she put out a hand to touch it, the globe became flesh, coalesced into a pulsing, blood-filled fist of bone and muscle and living energy. She held the ball in her two upturned palms and looked at it, half-entranced, half-repulsed by its carnality. She brought it to her lips and bit into it, felt the juice of blood run down her chin. There were deafening screams, coming from a place unknown to her, reverberating through her chest. Bones crunched and snapped, some of her teeth gave way and cracked, she swallowed them with the flesh she was eating until it was all inside of her. She walked out the front door of her house, pregnant with the burden of her life, the past and future gurgling inside her like a plugged drain. She leaned down into the turned earth in the front garden and vomited onto the soil. When she stood straight, what she had thrown up had become the countless thick stalks of giant sunflowers, reaching up to touch the low overcast sky. She dug her fingers into the fibrous stem of the closest one and began to climb.

  She awoke, raw and disturbed, convinced that the dream had revealed something terrible to her, something she could not quite understand. When she got down to the kitchen, Ziv was already there, waiting for the coffee to drip through.

  “Are you all right?” he said. He must have been able to see how disturbed she was. “You don’t look well.”

  “Yes,” she said unsteadily, and sat at the kitchen table across from him. She rubbed her cheeks with her open hands in an attempt to wake herself up. “I had a really disturbing dream,” she said.

  The phone rang. It seemed Ziv had picked up the phone, listened a moment, then put the phone back down without having spoken himself, although she realized he must have said something, however brief. Some of the brewed coffee had drooled down onto the hot plate beneath the pot, and the bitter smell of it frying penetrated the room.

  Ziv looked at her, his face gone an expressionless blank. “Alec’s dead. He hung himself.” He appeared to melt down into the chair nearest the phone. Dunya never did find out who’d called. Someone who lived near Alec, probably. There would have been police, an ambulance.

  She stood in stunned silence a moment, then went over beside her son and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “He told me he was going to kill himself. Just the other night. He told me!” Ziv’s hands began to tremble. Dunya felt herself weakening and pulled over a chair to sit on while she remained by her son’s side. They couldn’t have been there for more than a few moments when Arvel came in through the back door. The short burst of cold air he’d let in chilled the kitchen slightly. Without a coat or hat on, he’d come down the hill from the apartment he was renting on Bridge Avenue. His leather boots had been pulled on hastily and were loose and untied.

  “Is it true, what I just heard?” he said. He had a scared look on his face that Dunya had not seen since he was a child.

  Ziv nodded. “He’s dead,” he said. He looked up at his brother. “I believe it. He told me the other night at the party we were at. He said he was going to kill himself. Jesus, I didn’t do anything about it.”

  “How were you supposed to know?” Arvel said. “All the crazy talk that guy was prone to. How was anyone supposed to sort out what was real and what was bullshit?”

  “Don’t speak ill of him, Arvel,” Dunya said. “That poor boy. What must have he been going through?”

  The back door banged again and Dunya heard Ennis mumbling in the porch. She set the three steaming coffee cups on the table and went out to the porch to tell Ennis the news about Alec.

  She started at the sight of her husband. For a sliver of an instant she thought she was looking at a stranger. Ennis was bent over, wrestling with the laces of a boot. His clothes were covered with dark stains, his hair was spotted with what looked like fragments of dirty paper and Styrofoam. From the doorway, with her back to the kitchen, she smelled a terrible sour odour from him, like a sink full of dirty dishes that had been left to moulder for a week.

  He glanced up when both boots were off his feet, but his eyes did not exactly meet hers. His expression was desperate. He looked right through her.

  “You’re drunk,” she said. “Aren’t you.” She did not know what else to say. She’d never seen him drunk in the morning and she’d certainly never seen drink do anything like this to him. When he took off his coat she saw that his shirt was in tatters, stained much worse than the coat had been.

  His eyes focused on her. “Drunk!” He was outraged. “Nobody ever saw Ennis Burrows drunk at eight thirty in the morning. You must be drunk to suggest it.”

  Dunya remembered her sons in the kitchen and lowered her voice. “Ennis,” she said. “Something terrible has happened.”

  “Something terrible has happened,” he repeated her words and moved to push past her into the kitchen.

  She set herself solidly in the doorway in front of him. “No, listen, Ennis. There’s something I have to tell you.”

  “I already know,” he said.

  He placed a hand on her shoulder and moved her easily out of his way.

  Dunya followed him into the kitchen to shield her sons from their father in their time of grief, but stopped when she realized the kitchen was empty.

  She called after them. She ran through the house to the bottom of the stairs and called again, then noticed that the front door had been opened and not closed the whole way. She opened it and the cold bite of early winter entered. In what was left of yesterday’s snow on the front steps, she saw footprints where her two sons left the house in order to avoid their father.

  She closed the door and turned back into the house. There was a crack of light beneath the bathroom door. She walked down the hall and tried the handle. Locked. She felt a light-headedness strangely akin to elation.

  She curled her hands into fists and began pounding at the door. She banged some more. “Those boys have troubles today and look what you did. You made a bad situation worse. As always, Ennis, as always. Don’t you ever think of anyone other than yourself?” She continued to pound on the door. “Your own sons can’t bear to be aroun
d you.” She listened for any sort of response from inside the bathroom. She waited a long time, finally sitting down on the floor of the empty hallway.

  Ziv and Meta entered the church together, hand in hand. They made their way to the closest empty seats available, genuflected, then knelt for a moment of prayer. The smell in the air was of expiring candles and the stale incense that clung to the walls and furniture.

  Mr. Morrison was so drunk that two of his friends had to carry him into the church, one under each arm, walking slowly enough that Alec’s father had time to alternately place his left and right foot beneath himself to simulate walking. He had made a brief appearance at the funeral home the night before, in a similar condition. Instead of having him wait and go to the front of the church with the procession, where he’d only make a bigger spectacle, his friends helped him to the reserved pew at the front of the church and set him up between them, where he could not fall over.

  The priest had asked friends and family members to do the scripture readings but everyone refused. No one thought they would be able to hold up.

  Alec’s mother stood motionless in a black knee-length dress, her face overpowered by two thick, stern lines of eyebrow pencil. At the corner of her mouth, her lipstick was smeared halfway to her chinline, giving her face a deformed aspect. Beside her, a handsome middle-aged man had an arm draped consolingly around her shoulders. He was the next-door neighbour, a CPA whose wife had left him for an old boyfriend not quite a year before.

  Alec’s brother Ken stood at the far end of the waiting procession. He was turned at an odd angle, as though he did not belong to any of these proceedings and was about to walk out at any moment.