AN EASY WINTER
“Is it bad?” I asked her the question I had promised myself I wouldn’t ask.
She opened her eyes, looked our from behind the tubes that had been rammed up her nose. Then a smile. “No, nothing like you’d expect. I’m just tired.”
“No pain or anything?”
“A little. I’m glad you came. How’s Canada?” A bit more of a smile. To be honest, I couldn’t really hardly recognize her as my grandmother. My grandmother used to get up at six o’clock and go out to pick peas, bushels of peas, then shell the little buggers for about two hours, weed a half-acre of tomatoes and then do half a dozen chores worthy of five strong men before lunch time. The lady with the tubes was just a bag of bones and flesh. It was hard to connect the two. She knew it.
“Canada’s great. Lots of elbow room. Room to grow. The sky, the sea. Everything I do there is fresh and alive.” I was starting to sound like a god-damn chewing gum commercial. Clichés. All true, but clichés. “I couldn’t keep living here, I’d feel closed in.”
“I know. I’m glad you found Canada. Does it get cold?” She tried to raise her head a little but didn’t have the energy. I put my hand behind her head and tried to help her, only half succeeding. I was actually afraid that she might come apart. I eased her back down and noticed that her hair felt like that of a little girl.
“You get used to it. As long as I keep the woodstove going, you don’t ever notice a thing.” It was partly a lie. When the mid-winter arctic wind came whipping down across the frozen lake and slammed into the old wood frame house, it was like being buried alive in a moving avalanche. At night you could hear the fatal north, the shouting icy breath of the polar caps clawing at the walls, grinding away at the foundation and making the walls and joists snap in the cold. No matter how much wood you put in the old Ashley, the heat got sucked out into the night where it did no good at all. “Went through six cords of wood last winter. I’m getting lazy, though. I buy it in eight-foot lengths now. I cut it and split it. My bloody chain saw’s busted. Probably by next year I’ll be buying it cut, split and delivered.
“You never quite were the workaholic that your brother was.” She tried to crack a smile; she was teasing me. It’s true, my bother had been maniacal at doing physical work — farming, cutting and selling firewood, fixing trucks. I had spent half a lifetime hearing family tell me that I should try as hard as my brother. My grandmother had never said it once. It was funny she would tease me with it now, now that she was dying. “You know I’m only kidding,” she said, just to make sure I understood. “How’s the writing going?”
“I sold that collection of short fiction.” There wasn’t really much money in it, but I didn’t care. I noticed that I said short fiction instead of short stories. Did fiction sound more impressive? Stories sounded too familiar. But why did I do it to her, the last person I needed to impress? “Short stories, that is. Twenty of them. I don’t think they’re that good. In ten years I’ll be able to make the words do what I want. Now, I’m still practising.”
“I’m still practising, too. Don’t worry about practising. It’s all practising. For what, I don’t know, but it’s all practice and it’s all the real thing. No in between. Hand me that dish, please.”
There was a crescent-shaped blue plastic bowl that I tried to hand her, but I couldn’t seem to get her to grab ahold of it. “No, you’ll have to hold it, here by the pillow,” she instructed.
And then she spit out something yellow. “It’s these tubes. I can’s swallow right. After all these years of practising, and now I can’t swallow right. I forgot how to go to the bathroom when I have to, also. A lot of good all that practising did.” She stopped to take several long breaths, her eyelashes fluttered a bit; she was very tired, what was left of her. I heard my wife and my parents talking in low mumbles outside the door. They were probably wondering how I was making out. We had driven straight through from New Brunswick, twenty hours. A tractor trailer had jack-knifed and overturned not for ahead of us in Massachusetts. I didn’t stop. A lot of cars and trucks did; I didn’t. Kathy had looked at me in silence, I didn’t say anything. I’m sure there were other people stopping who could help out more than I could have, a doctor or somebody who’d taken first aid course. My parents had warned me that she might already be gone by the time we made it down. For once, they didn’t try to blame me for moving so far away. I blamed myself.
“Mark, listen.” She tried to raise her head again. “Don’t write any stories about old women dying. I hate those kinds of stories. Nobody likes them.”
“I promise, I won’t. What should I write about?”
“Write a western. Your grandfather loves westerns. You remember Zane Grey?”
“A little.”
“Good, write a book like Zane Grey. Get your grandfather to read it. He loves reading about the West. I think he married me because I was the only girl in Philadelphia that he ever met who came from West Texas.”
“I’ll write like Zane Grey and set the story in West Texas.” My grandfather was mostly blind. He wouldn’t read a book again and he hated the Books-on-Tape stuff that the lady from the Society for the Blind had brought. He was home now, asleep and unaware. When the time came, he would cry a lot. He had always been a very non-emotional kind of stubborn farmer. Closest thing to crying for him would have been a big drag on the snot in the back of his throat, a massive head and neck motion that sucked it all back in, the snot, the tears, the emotion. They didn’t raise kids to be sissies in Virginia, where he’d come from. His pride and his emotion had remained fiercely intact through the Depression and two World Wars. A few years ago, he had almost cried when his pair of bloodhounds with a total of forty years of life between them died. He didn’t cry, but it could have been almost. Instead, he got out his shotgun and shot at a bunch of crows tearing apart some ears of corn still on the stalk. Then he let out a big bellowing “Damn” when he missed.
I’m sure he would cry when she died, though. He was old enough and allowed to do so now. It could be used against him if he wasn’t careful. Ammunition. A sure indication of senility.
“Don’t put too much fightin’ and beatin’ up in the western, though. Your grandfather doesn’t mind it, but I never cared for it. It wasn’t like that. Mind you, some of it was true — the barrooms and the dancehall girls and a couple of drunk sheriffs. A lot of people shootin’ guns, but not at each other. That’s what I remember.”
I wished I could get those damn tubes out of her nose. You shouldn’t have to die with tubes stuck up your nose. A nurse walked in the door, and I wanted to motion her away. I could see my wife peeking in from outside. Yes, she’s still alive, dammit, I wanted to say to them all, now leave us alone. And I felt really selfish, too. I wanted her all to myself. I glared at the nurse, who stuck a needle in her arm and then, seeing my scowl, turned to go without saying a word.
What was funny, right now, was the total lack of concern I felt for anyone else. My wife out in the hall, my own parents. A big blank spot. There was just Vera...and me. (How odd to finally think of her as a person with a first name, a name I’d never used before that I could remember. Vera.) I wanted to fill in the gaps, the years.
“Do they still regard the Queen as the head of state up in Canada?” A funny thing to ask for someone on the verge of oblivion.
“I guess they do. She came to Halifax and everybody made a big ruckus. I can’t see the point to it, myself.”
“Still, it’s kinda nice. My mother always respected the Queen. I don’t think she ever forgave the Philadelphia Inquirer for printing that picture of the Queen walking down Market Street with her skirt getting blown sky high by the wind. Too much disrespect, even then.”
From another person, I would have written off that remark. I hated the notion of respectability. I had no desire to “be respectable.” In fact, maybe in this day and age, it’s a harmless enough vice to r
espect a queen. Blind obedience was something else. I remember when I was seventeen and got busted for breaking some windows at a courthouse in Camden during a demonstration against the Vietnam war. I needed five hundred bucks to put up my own bail, and it was a really bad time to even think about getting my parents involved. I took the chance that Vera would understand, and she did. She sent down the five hundred bucks with Ray, an old boozing Black guy they had working on the farm with them. Had my grandfather caught wind of it, he would have thought she’d lost her marbles. First off, he was a Republican and supported the President. Second, he would have been stone certain that Ray would run off with the loot.
Ray did turn up about twelve dollars short and a little bit loose around the gums, but I got out. I paid back my grandmother over a year or so. We never said a word about it.
“I’m glad you like Canada. If it’s where you wanna live, you should be there.” I fought back a couple of tears, then gave her a kiss on the cheek.
She lay there with her eyes closed, breathing heavily; gravity seemed to be working against her. Nobody had exactly pinpointed what was wrong with her — any of a dozen things, the doctors said. They offered to open her up and do exploratory surgery, but it had been a long haul the past year, in and out of the hospital. I think Vera understood it all. “There’s not really a thing wrong with me,” she had said, “except that I’m just really tired.” I was thankful that my parents had the good sense to let her ease off without any major new surgical or pharmaceutical battle. I respected them for it.
“Mark, I never rally told you about my father.” Her eyes were closed, each breath a minor victory, a taxing one.
“Not much. I know you lived out in Texas, where he ran a hotel. That’s about it.”
“Let me give you a bit more.” Her breathing was almost like snoring, and her eyes were still closed. It was like she was asleep...but she wasn’t. Just using all her strength on the words. “He was a dreamer, like you. Always searching for something better, something new, something exciting. First Tennessee, then Texas, the Colorado Springs, San Francisco. Did I ever tell you he was playing cards with Jack London when the earthquake hit?”
She had told me all this stuff years ago. It had bored me to distraction. In those days I was preoccupied with getting stoned and finding some new young lady to seduce. Grandmother’s stories weren’t my thing at all. It was different now.
“Well, Mom got kinda tired of lugging after the old man and convinced us to go back east, to Philadelphia, where there was plenty of work, what she called honest employment. Pop was a little down on his luck and reluctantly agreed. We took the train back from Texas. Trains took you everywhere in those days, and Pop loved a train more than anything.
“But two winter in Philadelphia and Pop wanted desperately to get back to West Texas. We had my grandmother living with us then, and she wanted us all to stay right here in North Philadelphia, where it seemed civilized to her. I don’t have the slightest notion what I wanted.”
It was hard to focus on all those generations of my family back there pulling at each other’s lives. I could never really think of great-grandparents as real people somehow, only faded images in a photograph.
“Pop caught tuberculosis, though, and they had to cut off his leg. The doctor said it had to be done right away, there in the kitchen. He used the same butcher’s knife that Mom had used to cut up meat, boiled it, poured half a gallon of whiskey down him, and then set to cutting. I’ll never forget the howl. But he lived.
“As soon as he could hobble around, he said he had to get back to Texas. The East was tryin’ to kill him. I woulda gone, too, only my mother couldn’t stand leaving because my grandmother refused to go. So the old man went on his own. He took a ship from down at the harbour. Never been on a ship before, only trains. But the ship was cheaper and could have put him in at Galveston. We never heard from him, though. I don’t think he lived long. His health was bad.”
She concentrated on breathing for a minute. If anything, the story seemed to have revived her a bit. There was no pain in her face.
“Just let me get out a little more. Your grandfather. He called me the cowgirl and married me. If it hadn’t been for all the Texas stuff, I would have been just another girl in the typing pool at the Navy Yard.”
“And I guess you two lived a pretty happy life all those years.” I thought maybe she was going to get to some sort of moral or something and was trying to help out.
She half sat up. “I didn’t say that.” She was emphatic. “Look, we did well enough. Better’n most and a little worse than some others.” That was an old standard of hers. “You know, in the old days we used to say, ‘Go to Halifax,’ when we really meant to say, ‘Go to . . .,’ but it was just a polite way around it. It was just a joke. Did you say you had a rough winter up there this year?” Her tone of conversation was now very casual, matter-of-fact, like we had just been talking yesterday and we were discussing the weather.
“It was a fairly warm winter, really. Got a bit of snow, but I remember one day in January where I was out with just a sweater on. Only burned about six cords of wood. The cold did hang around just a trifle too long, like it always does. It wasn’t that bad, though. Can’t say we suffered any for it.”
I felt each one of my own breaths seem to freeze in the air in front of my face. I waited to hear her next intake of air before I took another. Our breath mingled in the stale hospital air between us; it came together beneath the cold fluorescent lights.
THE DREAM AUDITOR
He arrived on Friday afternoon while I was washing my car. It didn’t seem right. Friday afternoon was a time of amnesty, and now this.
The dream auditor drove up in one of those typical government cars — anonymous, dark, a model named after a letter in the alphabet.
“We’ve been looking into your account,” he stated outright, without a handshake or a word of introduction.
“I didn’t know I had one,” I answered, wanting to turn the hose on him but holding back, sensing some mysterious power in the hollow of his cheeks.
“These things don’t just happen, you know.”
“Things?”
“Dreams. Fantasies. Wistful longings.”
“I think you’re out of line,” I told him and asked him to leave. But, not wanting to take any chances, I sent out a signal to Harry, my telepathic raven. Harry could be counted on to deal with unwanted strangers. Already I could see that Harry had received my message and was homing in from across the field, where he had been harassing field mice.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” the dream auditor said and handed me a business card. “It’s funny how few of you are willing to accept the work of our department.”
I was glad I didn’t have any sharp objects within reach. The man was testing my patience. Harry was above him now, squawking, about to lunge for the hat with his talons.
“Please,” the dream auditor said in a cold, flat voice. “We know all about you. We’ve been listening in for years. Now I’ve simply come to issue a statement. We’ve carried your account for a long time. Surely you know others who have dealt with us.”
So then it sank in. Dream taxes. Harry understood my despair and backed away, drifted backwards in the light breeze and landed on the roof. The nice thing about telepathic ravens is that you never have to think the same thought twice. They always get the picture in 3-D. Dream taxes.
The man started to open a ledger book. “I’ve already deducted nightmares and sleepless nights. The code is quite liberal. Daydreams, of course, are less costly as well, since they are primarily of your own doing. And generally very mundane, anyway. Everything else was generously supplied by our ministry. You gave us some good hints, though. It always works that way. “And now what do you want?”
“Payment on taxes due, sir. No more, no less.”
“And if I can’t come up wit
h it?”
“We close your account!”
“You can’t threaten me!” Harry was in the air squawking now. He didn’t have to be telepathic to know what I was thinking.
“It’s no threat. Besides, you have nothing to lose. Nothing but your dreams. Think of it this way: up until now, it’s all been free samples. From here on, you have to pay as you go.”
“And if I don’t pay, I don’t dream?”
“Yes. That is the way it works. Few adapt to it easily.”
“Look, why should I care if you take away my dreams? I can’t even remember a dream I’ve honestly enjoyed in the last year.”
He opened the ledger again and ran his finger down a column. “Here it is. February 12. Plane crashes in the South Pacific on its way to the international cheerleaders’ convention in Malaysia. All survive on a deserted atoll. Only one male, the pilot. You.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Pity. We helped you out with that one. One of our old standby programs. You added a few variations. It’s nice when our work becomes co-operative.”
“Are they all like that?”
“Truth is, most of it is pretty gloomy. You get back at your enemies in quaint and uncreative ways. Other times, your dreams are downright unpleasant. You know: standing in front of your office staff in your underwear, stepping into elevators and discovering there’s nothing there but an empty shaft. Or simply running to catch a missed bus.”
“I could live without all that.”
“Could you?”
“Yes.”
“Others have tried.”
“And?”
“And not made out so good. You see, what you don’t get out of your system in dreams — both impossibly good and pathetically bad — you have to work out in your waking life. Frankly, most people don’t have the time or the endurance.”
I thought about it for a minute, watching Harry as he picked at the black feathers in his wings. He seemed to have forgotten about me, and the dream auditor appeared to be getting more impatient.
Dance the Rocks Ashore Page 17
