He swings a leg over his bike, boots the kickstand down, and strides toward the chanters. They part as he passes through them. The only one who keeps chanting is Candace Brown, whose voice is as rough as sandpaper from weeks of screaming at our family. She follows behind my grandfather, waving her Pretenders and Idolaters will SUFFER! placard at him, until he steps into the Tabernacle and closes the door behind him.
Adeline’s mother walks to the edge of our driveway, glaring at me as if she’s trying to light me on fire with her rage. “Do you think we don’t know what goes on inside your house?” she hisses. “Do you think we haven’t heard the rumours?”
“Whatever,” I say.
“You . . . you . . . hideous . . . we will expose your father’s lies. We will expose all of you, you . . . you . . . mutant! We will make you all pay for pushing Adeline from the path of righteousness.”
“Maybe you pushed her from the path,” I suggest.
For minutes that seem like hours, the eyes of the other five protestors flit from me to Candace Brown to the Tabernacle door.
My grandfather eventually emerges with Pastor Vangelis.
“Children of the Lord,” the pastor booms from the steps, “this vigil of protest will now end. Please come inside.”
The congregants do as they have been instructed, filing one by one into the windowless concrete building, dragging their signs and banners behind them, except for Candace Brown. She stands there, arms akimbo, and croaks, “What?”
“There will be another time, Candace,” Pastor Vangelis says. “Come inside.”
“But . . . ”
“Come inside, child.”
“But . . . the sacred bond . . . they must be punished . . . ”
“Candace . . . ”
“They took my daughter away from me!” she rasps.
“Adeline was lost to us anyway,” Pastor Vangelis says, more firmly this time. “Now, Candace, come inside. There will be another day.”
Adeline’s mother walks through the Tabernacle door, her head hung low. Pastor Vangelis enters behind her, and pulls the door closed with a solid thump.
My grandfather straddles his bicycle once again.“What did you say in there?” I wonder.
“I’ll explain everything over some good food and an excellent bottle of wine,” he says, pedaling forward. “Come on.”
We turn onto Main Street, and I pedal along beside him.
“Seriously,” I insist, “how did you know that the pastor would make them stop? I can’t wait until lunch.”
My grandfather pedals faster; the chain and sprockets hiss and click as he shifts into a higher gear. I push harder to keep up.
“Well, I didn’t know what the pastor would do. There is no insurance in life, Philip. There are no guarantees. You can only do what you have to do, and hope that things go your way. Let’s just say,” he says between breaths, “that each person in a small town is a gear in a complex little machine, like the works inside a clock. If you want to be sure that everything keeps running the way it should, then you’ve got to make sure that you’re the drive gear, the gear that powers all the others.”
“Is that a quote from somebody famous?” I wonder.
“I came up with that one by myself,” my grandfather says.
As we pedal under the single set of stoplights in downtown Faireville, my grandfather coasts to the curb. “Wait here with the bikes,” he instructs, then he goes next door into Angus Angelo’s, his favourite butcher shop.
“That’s some grandfather you’ve got there, son,” says a grey-haired man, as he hobbles past with a woman who is probably his wife. “Best damn mayor this town ever had.”
“Yes, sir,” I reply.
He looks admiringly at my grandfather’s bike. It’s a simple machine, with fat, old-fashioned tires, an enclosed chain and gears, a sprung seat, with everything painted semi-gloss black, including the wheel spokes, handlebars, and the wire basket over the wide front fender. It looks like it may have been built during World War Two.
“They take away his driver’s licence, and he just keeps on goin’ on an old bicycle,” he says. “The only thing that’s ever gonna take ol’ Vernon Skyler down is the Grim Reaper himself. Ain’t nobody else is gonna do it.”
“No, sir,” I say.
“When he comes out, tell him that Willie Wendell said ‘hi.’”
“Yes, sir.”
As the couple wanders away, Willie Wendell’s wife whispers to him, “Isn’t it nice that the ol’ mayor spends so much time with his retarded grandson?”
Retarded grandson?
“He’s a class act,” Willie Wendell whispers back. “And I’ll bet he taught the kid his manners, ‘cause I doubt that fruity father of his has done ‘im much good.”
Willie Wendell’s wife giggles.
I want to turn around and say something unmannered to these twittering old buffoons, but my grandfather has emerged from the butcher shop, and I don’t want to embarrass him. Into the basket on his bicycle he drops a plump bundle wrapped in brown waxed paper. “Angelo saved the two best filets for us,” he says. “I guess I’ve still got some influence in this town.”
As we pedal through Faireville, some of the older people on the sidewalks wave, tip their hats, and call out “Hallo, Mayor,” and “Hiya, Vernon,” to my grandfather. He answers each of them by name.
I am seated comfortably in one of the red leather chairs across the dining room table from my grandfather, but my body feels like it is floating in the air, since we shared a bottle of red wine during our extravagant lunch. Before we ate, I was dispatched to the basement to select a bottle from the wine cellar. I had no idea my grandfather had a wine cellar.
“Pick a nice Bordeaux,” he instructed, “something from the top or second row of the rack nearest the door — a Pomerol, St. Emillion, or a Pauillac.”
I was astonished. There were hundreds of dust-coated bottles lying on their sides in dark wood racks, with names like Chateau Lafite, Latour, Margaux, Mouton-Rothschild, Haut-Brion, Petrus, Valandraud. I randomly grabbed one.
My grandfather inspected the bottle before carefully pouring its contents into a wide-bottomed decanter, the smell of the wine filling the room like blackcurrant jam cooking.
“1990 Lafite-Rothchild Pauillac,” he said. “A good choice, Philip. This one cost me close to a thousand dollars at auction. Sotheby’s, I think . . . or maybe it was Bonham and Butterfield. I should keep better track of these things.”
“A thousand dollars?” I yelped. “For a bottle of wine?”
“Today I am going to let you in on a secret,” he said, his eagle eyes glinting mischievously, “that will be worth celebrating with a good bottle of wine.”
Now we’ve finished the bottle, which was so delicious I still feel faint — and it’s not just the effect of the alcohol coursing through my bloodstream.
“So when are you going to let me in on this great secret?” I blurt out.
“Let’s retire to the living room,” my grandfather says, “and chat like civilized men. Would you like to try a glass of good vintage port?”
“Sure!” I say, being careful not to slur the word.
My grandfather joins me in his living room, with a bottle in one hand and two port glasses in the other. “1983,” he says wistfully as he fills my glass with the tawny liquid. “A very good year. The year I first hired your mother.” Then he adds, “Which, of course, allowed your father to meet her, and is the reason I’m lucky to share your good company today.”
He sits down on the Edwardian-style sofa across from me. Although the outside of my grandfather’s house looks like the bungalow of any retired farmer or factory-worker in Faireville, the interior is impeccably decorated, like a miniature palace. He crosses his leg at the knee, settles back, then jumps up again.
“Cigars!” he says. “Port like this deserves a great cigar!”
He crosses the room to the fireplace mantle, where he lifts the lid of a small wooden box that h
as been up there for as long as I can remember. The room fills with a sweet, earthy scent. He withdraws two cigars about the thickness and twice the length of my thumb, trims them with a tiny silver guillotine, then returns to his casual perch on the sofa. He dips the trimmed end of the his cigar into his port, lights it up, then passes the lighter and the other cigar over to me. I duplicate his moves exactly.
“Don’t inhale,” he warns, “just fill your cheeks with the smoke, savour its taste for a moment, then let it curl back out of your mouth.”
We sit together for a while, saying nothing, just sipping the port and watching the thick white smoke from our cigars curl languidly toward the ceiling. I have never felt more sophisticated, more gentlemanly than I feel right now. I have also never felt more light-headed.
“Was that wine really worth a thousand dollars?” I wonder.
“I’ve got a few bottles of 1998 Chateau Petrus that are worth about three thousand a bottle,” my grandfather says. “The port we’re drinking, which I bought right from the source in Portugal back when it was released, is likely worth about that now. You’re surprised that I have that kind of money, aren’t you?”
He takes a long sip of his port, then a deep pull from his cigar.
“In politics, Philip, especially local politics, I realized early on how important it was to cultivate an image that allowed people to project themselves onto me. Most of the people who vote in municipal elections here in Faireville are hardworking people with simple lives. I was successful in politics here because I always seemed to be one of them.”
He takes another long sip from his port glass.
“If people knew how much money I actually have, they wouldn’t trust me the way they do. They would not be able to project themselves onto me. So, I keep it quiet. I live in a modest home, but in the privacy of my home I eat good food, drink excellent wine, and I smoke these great cigars. I drove what seemed to them to be a modest old car, when in fact each year it cost me more than the price of a new Cadillac to keep it running. Now I ride what looks like a modest old bicycle, but it’s a Swiss-made machine I imported for ten thousand dollars. Unlike many people with wealth, I practice inconspicuous consumption.”
“How did you manage to make so much money?” I ask. If Dennis were here, I bet he would feel a lot closer to our grandfather after hearing this.
“Real estate,” he says. “I’ve bought up a lot of property here in Faireville, one lot, one building, one bank auction, one estate sale at a time. Half the population here pays rent to me, or their mortgage payments go into my bank account. And, because I rent at lower rates than the other landlords, and I offer lower interest rates than the banks, half the people in this town ‘owe me one.’ In politics, it’s good when a lot of people ‘owe you one.’”
I’m having difficulty focusing my eyes. My grandfather keeps splitting into two hazy grandfathers. I’m drunk for the first time in my life. It is not an unpleasant feeling.
“To paraphrase you,” I say, somewhat murkily, “you’re the gear that drives all the other gears and wheels in Faireville.”
“Exactly,” he says. “How do you think I got Pastor Vangelis to call his flock away earlier today?”
“How?”
“Well, it seems that nobody informed him that the ground the Tabernacle is built on is not owned by them, but is in fact leased for a ten-year term. From me. I simply pointed out to the good pastor that it would be a very sorry situation indeed if I refused to renew their lease when it expires next year. None of those trailers they’ve got parked there are big enough to tow that big concrete building away.”
My grandfather drains the last of his port, then takes another long, deep draw from his cigar.
“But I didn’t invite you here to impress you with my wine cellar or my cigars or my real estate holdings. There is something else I want to tell you about, because I may need your help at some point.”
“Sure,” I say. “Anything you want. What is it?”
“To quote George Bernard Shaw: ‘We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.’ And, even if I am eighty-four years old, even if they have taken away my driver’s licence, even if my eyes are beginning to fail me, I am not ready to quit playing just yet. Can I trust you to keep a secret, until I decide the time is right?”
“Of course!”
He slowly sucks the last bit of cigar down. When the last tendrils of smoke have risen out of his mouth, he crushes the butt of the cigar in the silver-and-marble ash stand next to the sofa. “I’m coming out of political retirement,” he says. “I’m going to run against Clarence Brush in the next municipal election, and I’m going to beat him. I’m waiting for exactly the right moment to announce my intention. I am going to be the mayor of this town again. When the time comes, Philip, will you help me?”
“Sure,” I say. “Anything you want.”
“Excellent. Would you like another splash of port, my boy?”
Of course I would.
As I leave his house, my grandfather slips a roll of five fifty-dollar bills into my hand. “Invest it wisely,” he says.
I stumble through town in a pleasant, drunken haze. I hold onto the handlebars of my bike as I walk, to keep myself from falling over. As I roll through the Downtown Business District, past Jackie Snackie’s, the Sergeant-at-Arms, Angus Angelo’s, The Goode Faith Gift Shoppe, The Tea Cozy, and Faireville Worldwide Wonders, I wonder just how many of them are paying rent or mortgage money to my grandfather.
By the time I reach the spot where our laneway meets the highway, where the Tabernacle of God’s Will stands, my legs wobble like they’re made of half-melted rubber. Everything I see is in blurry duplicate. It’s Sunday afternoon now, and the Tabernacle parking lot is packed full. I walk my bike between the cars and right up to the towering concrete structure.
“My grandfather owns you!” I shout at the Tabernacle building. “And one of these days, I’ll own you, too. Whether you like my family or not. Whether you like my face or not. I’ll get you back for what you’ve done to Adeline. And to me. And to Cecil and Caleb and everyone else you look down on.”
And I realize that I am speaking not just to Pastor Vangelis and Candace Brown and the other members of the Tabernacle of God’s Will, but to all of them. To Sam Simpson, Trevor Blunt, and Brandon Doggart. To Graham and Grant Brush, and to their father as well. To the Little Colour Girls, and to their mothers, too. To people like Willie Wendell, who assume I’m retarded because of my face. To the people like his wife who giggle about it.
“All of you!” I holler. “I’m gonna be the gear that drives you all!”
Then there is a liquid roar as my stomach erupts, blasting hot, acidic bile up through my throat and mouth. I launch a slick of crimson vomit onto the Tabernacle’s concrete steps.
And now I notice the tiny surveillance camera mounted just above the door of the Tabernacle of God’s Will. Great. Wonderful.
I grab my bike and run uphill as fast as my melting rubber legs will carry me.
City Girl
In my dramatically intoxicated state, I somehow manage to crawl up the stairs and wobble into my bedroom. Looks like I left the computer turned on. Adeline’s daily email is waiting for me:
Phillip,
The only thing I miss about Faireville is you. When are you going to scrape together the train fare and come visit me in Toronto? I’ll make it worth your while!
Love and other indoor sports,
Adeline
I pull the roll of fifties from my pocket. “Invest it wisely,” he said. I call Dennis.
“Dennis? Remember you said I could come visit you any time? How ‘bout next weekend?”
“Phil? Bro? Is that you?”
I can hear a girl giggling in the background.
“It’s me. Can I come stay at your place next weekend?”
“Are you okay, Phil? You sound funny.”
“I’m drunk.”
“You’re dru
nk? That’s hilarious! I musta set a good example for you. Atta boy! I’m so proud!”
There is more of the girl-voice in the background.
“My little brother is calling me drunk!” he says, forgetting to cover his phone. “No, no — of course I’m drunk — he’s the one who’s — aw, never mind. Oh, yeah, yeah — it’s in the brown envelope on the side table . . . ”
“Dennis?”
“Sorry, buddy — I’ve got a friend, well, a colleague here at the moment. And, yeah, sure you can come up next weekend. But I won’t be able to spend a whole lotta time with you. I’ve got some business, and a date, and . . . ”
“It’s okay, Dennis. I’m coming to Toronto to visit this girl I know . . . ”
“Little bro’s got a chick? Awesome! Hey, maybe we’ll both get lucky next weekend!” There is the sound of a door slamming from beyond Dennis’ phone. “Hey! Hey! Wait!” Dennis abruptly hangs up the phone.
I turn back to the computer and type:
Hi Adeline,
You’ve convinced me. I’ll be there next weekend. See you then.
Philip
PS –Do you happen to know how often the Tabernacle checks the tape from their security camera?
People born in little towns like Faireville grow up believing that leaving is a difficult and scary thing to do. It isn’t. Getting to Dennis’ place in Toronto is almost too easy — I walk across the East End to the train station, buy my ticket, and then I just relax and watch the flat scenery of Southwestern Ontario roll past the window of the train for the next few hours.
The train arrives in Toronto right on time, exactly four hours and twenty-seven minutes after it pulled away from Faireville. As soon as I step out of the car, I feel the difference. While Faireville Station is nothing more than a wood-sided shack at the edge of a farmer’s field, entering the Great Hall of Union Station feels like emerging from a cocoon into the great big world.
People dragging luggage and swinging briefcases crisscross around me as I stop to absorb the Beaux-Arts details of the massive space, its vaulted ceiling, its cast-framed windows surrounded by sturdy arches of carved stone. The names of Canadian cities are carved in bold Romanesque letters half-way up the tall stone walls: EDMONTON · SASKATOON · WINNIPEG · PORT-ARTHUR · NORTH-BAY · SARNIA · LONDON · TORONTO · OTTAWA · SHERBROOKE · LÉVIS · MONCTON. The names tell me this: A person can go anywhere from here.
The Monkeyface Chronicles Page 13
