“Don’t flatten it too much,” my mother said, “or it won’t be a hill anymore.”
In late October he drove the Caterpillar into the coulee and it stuck. Then he went out each day with a shovel and stayed away until dark. He’d turn the Caterpillar engine on and leave the door open so that he could listen to the country music station while he shovelled and drank. Before the snow flew he put a blue tarp up and kept on working. In the dead of winter, still he went. The mud would have frozen even if the snow didn’t get in through the tarp. We never went over to check what he did when that was the case.
The blue tarp was visible from the road, and every day we drove by it twice on the bus route, to and from school. In the spring—a few days before we left him—the tarp came down and my father drove the Caterpillar out of the coulee and parked it behind the house. He didn’t mention the event, and neither did we. My mother began to park the station wagon on the side of the road, even though there was still enough room in the drive.
I WAS ALLOWED TO carry my own ticket, but my brother was not. I was not allowed to carry his. My sister, Emira, carried his, and she carried her own. In my own hand was my own ticket, and nothing more. When we stood on the platform, Emira said: We should guess the exact minute that the train will arrive. Emira was right. How did you do that, you must have cheated, I said. How would I cheat, she asked. Listen to yourself.
My mother gave us each a bun and a stick of cheese. If you eat it now, you’ll be hungry later, she told us, but I ate mine right away. My brother saved his bun on his lap, and lay the stick of cheese beside it. All day, I watched the bun get dry and the cheese sweat. I told my brother, You should eat that now. Look, it’s being ruined. Let me eat a little of it, I’m bigger than you and need more food. He said, No. I will wait a little longer. My mother slept in the seat in front of us. Her head was on the window. It bounced sometimes but she did not wake up until it got light. How can she sleep, I asked Emira. Hush, Emira said. My brother, too, drifted off to sleep. His hand covered the bun in his lap and the cheese with its beads of sweat that had turned cold on top. I could not steal it. My father did not sleep. He walked up and down the car. Then, in the exact middle of the night, when everyone except us two, in the whole world, was sleeping, he turned in his seat and looked into my eyes. I did not intend this, he said. I nodded. But maybe it’s better this way.
When my mother woke she gave us each another bun and another stick of cheese. Now my brother had two meals in his lap. Eat your food, said my mother, crossly. Don’t act like a poor person. My brother said to me: You can have that bun now, and he stretched out his hand, with the stale bun in it, to me. I laughed in his face. I would not touch it.
ONE DAY, ON OUR WAY into town, we smelled a barbecue in someone’s yard. I looked out the window and saw a low house, with the smoke of the grill rising up, over the top of the fence. The bent head of a man could be seen. He was wearing a hat.
“Do you ever wish,” I asked my mother, “that we were a regular family, who did regular things?”
“Oh yes,” my mother said, “all the time.”
THE MORNING WE LEFT my father, he said he’d drive us in to school. He was like an animal, and sensed something in the air. We didn’t tell him. “Let’s go up to the lot after school,” he said. “Let’s clear a few trees, then go out for a meal.” He talked the whole way to town, though in those days we almost always drove in silence.
“We’ll cut hay this year,” he said. “You kids will help. We’ll get a horse. Be cowboys.”
My mother picked us up after school with the boxes in the back of the station wagon, and then we unpacked them at an apartment in town. We didn’t go back to my father’s house for some weeks and when we did there was a note on the table that said, I’m just out at the lot, I’ll be back before long.
“How did he know we were coming today?” my brother said. I said: “How do you know that he wrote that this morning?”
AFTER THE WAR, my father’s father came home, and for seven months he stayed. The neighbours wrote things on his wall, and on the stone outside his step. Worse than that. They did not like a German.
I’m not a German, my father’s father said, but he took his children to Bavaria, and raised them near the border. His gentle wife he treated like a rag, but other than that he was a kind, and homesick, man.
NOW MY AUNT Emira says: “Ha! ‘There wasn’t a stick in the house,’ the man says. It goes to show you the holes in his story.”
Then my father starts to sing and Emira goes for the spoon. “I’m not saying Uncle Alen wasn’t shot,” he relents before she can hit him, “I’m just saying Nino was too. I saw him. Out on the lawn. Stretched, as though resting. We didn’t have shoes.”
“You fool,” my aunt says. “You think they took the bed from under you? You think they took it while you slept?”
“I didn’t sleep,” my father says. “I haven’t slept my whole long life.” He starts to sing. Aunt Emira brings the spoon down—hard—on the table.
“Stop singing those songs,” she tells him. “People will hate you. Your children will hate you. Do you want that? Do you want that, you dummy?”
“What’s wrong with singing?” my father asks. Then looks up, and wags his head in a loop, as if searching for the cynic who might be hidden somewhere. “What’s wrong with singing a song sometimes?”
“No one sings like that anymore,” Emira says. “Or not that you’d remember. It’s been years,” she says, “since anyone who isn’t crazy’s sung a song like that.”
She turns to my brother and then she turns to me. “I’m sorry for you,” she says. My brother and I are sitting up, very tall and still, in our straight-backed chairs.
Our plates—recently—have been pushed away as far as we can push them.
“I’m sorry to tell you that your father is crazy.”
My brother nods slowly.
“You’re not even German,” she informs my father, the spoon in the air. “You’re Croatian,” she says. “And now you live in the sticks of Red Deer, Alberta—face facts.”
My father continues: “You were sleeping, and so you wouldn’t have known. It was—exactly—the middle of the night. Everyone in the whole wide world, but me and our father, was sleeping. Only I and my father were awake in the world.”
Aunt Emira hits my father again with the spoon so that his head bobs to the table and into his arms. He says: “He turned. He looked into my eyes. He put one hand to his heart. He said—” But his voice is too muffled by his sleeve.
“It’s possible,” my aunt says, “that the dog was simply making too much noise.”
“He howled and would not stop,” my father agrees. Aunt Emira sighs. “I suppose it could have happened that the dog was also shot, but,” she says, and shakes the spoon, “they did not take one stick of furniture from that house.”
WHEN WE ARRIVED, months late, for the Christmas dinner, there was a note on the table. I’m at the lot, it said. Make yourselves comfortable. I’ll be back before long.
But my father was not at the lot when we got there. He was stretched, instead, in his favourite living room chair. The television was on, but the sound was turned off.
“When did you leave us the note?” I asked him. “When were you up at the lot?”
My father turned the TV off. He smiled at my brother and me as we stood in the doorway.
Aunt Emira said: “A week ago. He hasn’t been out of the house for a week.”
“But,” I said, and paused. “We didn’t know ourselves we were coming, until the day before last,” I said. “Who did you write the note to?”
My aunt waved the question away, but my father answered.
“I wrote just in case.”
Emira nodded, and shrugged. Then shook her head at us, back and forth.
The artificial Christmas tree still stood in the corner, and my father got up then, from his chair, and plugged it in so that the coloured lights blinked on and flashed; on and off, on and off, in a
n irritating spiral.
BEFORE WE LEFT my father, we flew to Bavaria and rented a car at the airport and drove to the house of my uncle there. What my father recalls is the flight. How we were offered a seat in first class, and how for the first half of the trip my father sat up there, in front, and at the exact halfway point in the flight he got up abruptly and gave up the seat to my mother.
“They served me champagne,” he said. “Called me sir.”
Then he came to sit back in the regular section with my brother and me. He leaned over our two narrow seats to look out of the window, and pressed his knuckles up to the glass.
“When I was a boy, I thought I’d feel flying all over my body,” he said. “Like when you dream it, I mean.”
We drove around in the rented car and helped my uncle in the kitchen garden. I thought, If I’d been raised with a kitchen garden, things would have been different.
My grandfather was a happy man; he did not seem bad.
My mother disapproved of the way my grandmother wouldn’t sit down with us at mealtimes to eat, and so she kept her company in the kitchen, and wrote recipes down in a yellow notebook, with blue cornflowers on the front, in a row. When, later, my mother made the meals at home and they did not taste the same as they had at my grandmother’s place, she blamed the store-bought food and spices. “Things taste better that have been grown outdoors,” she said. “That’s why we moved to Alberta, to grow things outdoors. And now all we have in the yard is a Caterpillar and a taken-down house.”
“Don’t lose sight,” she told me, “of the things in your life, in this way.”
THE MEAL IS VENISON, and potatoes, and my aunt’s fruit bread, which is so hard it needs to be wet down with water to eat. It’s okay to say that the fruit bread is hard.
“That’s the way it should be,” my aunt Emira says. “It won’t last if it’s soft.”
My father recovers himself somewhat and sits up again, and smiles, but doesn’t speak until he’s finished his beer. I think it’s his last.
Then he says, “Tell your father what you need,” and looks at my brother and me.
I say, “Don’t worry about us.”
Emira says, “You’re happy, then?” She nods and nods her head, up and down. “Things are going well for you, in town?”
“Yes,” I say. My brother nods, too. Just once: yes.
Aunt Emira clasps her hands at her chest and says, “Isn’t that a blessing. Sasa, isn’t that a blessing. You have two children—nothing to show for yourself, except that—and even when they come, three months late, for Christmas”—her voice rises in the way that it rises when she prays out loud in the yard—“and you’ve nothing to give them to take home to town—”
I didn’t know that my aunt Emira got drunk, but now she is not making sense, and my father looks strange. I wish that I could stop things, and put them back. It is difficult to say now what will happen next, or if it should matter.
“Neither,” my aunt continues, “do they—either of them—need a thing in the world. We should all be so lucky. Make mistakes like you, brother. Of such little consequence.”
WHEN WE GET OUT of the train the light is beginning to fall, from the sky to the long shoulders of the track by the road. Everything looks bright and clean as if no one had touched anything. The track—stretching here one way, here another—cuts the hill in such a way that it appears to be the very limit of things.
After that there is only the sky, a dull and nearly absent blue.
My brother makes a small sound as though he is dreaming, but he is awake now; I believe he is happy.
In a little while, the light, too, will disappear, I tell my brother. And when it goes, then so too the track. Then so too the train and the grass (which is now just bare of snow, though not yet, I say, completely). But I and our father (I tell my brother so that he will not worry) will remain, unsleeping.
The sun, beginning to settle, startles itself on the grass, and jumps from dull blade to blade, and stays finally nowhere.
WHEN WE LEAVE MY father’s house, my aunt gives each of us, my brother and me, a loaf of the heavy fruit bread to take home to my mother.
“She will have missed this stuff, too,” my aunt says. “They make everything soft in the store.”
My father is back in the den, with the TV’s sound on now. “Say goodbye to him,” we say to Aunt Emira. Then we scrunch our eyes shut when she hugs us, and go out to the car.
When we’re in the car, I am very precise about putting it into gear. I spin the wheel in several firm rotations. I like to drive. I feel grown-up. I imagine my aunt and my father watching. Not saying anything to each other, but watching, each from a different vantage point of the windowed house, and thinking: It’s true. Their lives have come together, in the way that they planned.
I do not think it’s likely they’re watching, but still I imagine that they are, and feel glad when we complete the turn in my father’s drive without stalling the car, and begin to pick up speed, and pass the coulee, and head out to the highway.
I think: So this is how it feels to be a grown-up person. I look at my hands as if they belong to someone else. I feel neat, and gathered up within myself, as if I took a broom to the far corners of my body and swept myself clean into a pile.
CLARENCE
ALL MY LIFE, Clarence had lived at the top of the Lakehead road in a tall, upright house that looked just like my mother’s. It wasn’t, however, until I was eighteen years old—the summer I got a job working for the Weekly Gleaner in town—that I ever laid eyes on him.
Guy was the Gleaner’s editor-in-chief. He said Clarence was the oldest man in the county—probably even the state. It was hard to tell exactly, and even more difficult to prove. Clarence himself hardly knew anymore just how long he’d been alive. He didn’t get around much, hadn’t for a while. Not, at least, for eighteen years. Even the Save-Easy boy (who had grown, over the intervening period, into a surly, dough-faced Save-Easy man) never saw Clarence anymore when he went up to the house once a week, delivering the groceries and the mail.
But that was the summer of the fiftieth-anniversary spread, and Guy said he wanted Clarence right on the cover. I’d only just started, but he gave the job to me anyway. “Let the old fella tell you a thing or two,” he said, when he sent me up the road. I could tell he thought that he was doing me a favour.
IT WAS CLARENCE’S WIFE, of course—twenty-five years younger—and not Clarence himself, who came to the door. She had taken her time, and when she did arrive, she opened the door only partway—hardly wide enough to pass. “Oh, it’s you,” she said. “Come from the paypah.”
I nodded my head, and indicated my new camera, which I had purchased with my own money. She stared—first at it, and then at me—before, finally, opening the door a little wider. “Well,” she said. “Come in. He sure ain’t coming to greet you.”
In the same way that people, over the years, come to resemble the things that surround them—their animals, their wives—Clarence had come to resemble his house. He was tall, even sitting upright in his living room chair. Straight as a chimney. And—like all the houses along the Lakehead road, where large families had long ago moved into town—mostly shut-up-looking, like only one or two rooms were lived in at all.
And old. Terminally so. His eyes sunk so deep in his head, like inset windows, that his skin, where his eyes should have been, ruffled out around them like curtains for the Fourth of July. His long neck was so thin and straight that his head seemed to be set there as if only temporarily. When, finally, I worked up the courage to speak, I did so quietly—afraid of disrupting what seemed to be a delicate balance. Even with how eager I was to get Clarence’s name—and my own—onto the front page of the anniversary special, I didn’t mind particularly when I saw that there was no story to find at Clarence’s house. Even when (cautiously) I managed to lift my voice, each of my carefully prepared questions was met only by a devastating silence. I was happy enough not to test the l
imits of that particular silence. Happy enough to take my leave as quickly and discreetly as possible, and—having gleaned nothing—simply head back to town. I had, in fact, just resolved to go when I discerned a low hum—a sort of sad, slow whistle, like a distant train—which (emanating, as it did, from Clarence’s general direction) I took to be a form of reply. Still—and though I strained, desperately, to do so—I could not make out a single word. Once more, I resolved to make my departure.
But again I was checked by something. Again, I paused, cleared my throat, and read through the list of questions I had prepared earlier in the day. This time, though, the words stuck curiously in my throat; I nearly choked on them. I had not even reached the middle of the page when I stopped, mid-sentence. I wanted only to get away—and fast. What, I wondered, had possessed me to enter that house at all? To trespass that last, and most remote outpost at the end of the Lakehead road? What had I hoped to uncover there?
Still, for some reason, I remained. Setting my notebook and pen gingerly to one side, I sat, uncomfortably, as the low and wordless hum, which I had taken, just a moment ago, as a sort of reply, continued to echo—as though from a great distance—from the general direction of Clarence’s large, and mostly emptied, frame.
Finally, I unpacked my camera and shot a roll of film as if at random. Then, and without announcing my intention to either Clarence or his wife—I let myself out the front door, and pretty well ran all the way back into town.
GUY WAS NOT SO easily discouraged. Once he set his mind to something it was pretty well set, and that summer he was set on having Clarence on the cover of the anniversary special. “Don’t worry,” he said when I returned. “You’ll try again tomorrow.” He slapped me on the back, hard—in a way that he had no doubt hoped was encouraging—and was about to leave when he caught a glimpse of one of the photographs I had printed from my hastily shot roll, drying on the rack by the door. “Hey,” he said, “that’s not half bad.” He pinched the print from its hold and looked at it more carefully. Then he handed it back, nodding gravely. “You could still make the covah,” he told me—but now it sounded like a warning.
This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories Page 6
