As soon as the ground thawed in the spring, Owen and his grandfather continued their work on the backyard dam. It was necessary to reconstruct the scaffolding in the places where, over the winter, it had crumbled. This time, they were able to use the sticks and brush from the trees the power company had felled in the previous fall, eliminating the landscape.
Gradually it began to dawn on Henry that his father had, quite simply, gone mad.
It was not only the grandfather who had refused to go, but it was the grandfather who stayed longest – who, even after Henry and Owen had relocated to the newly built government house off the lake road, continued, without Owen’s help now, to work on the backyard dam. So that every day, for four weeks, until they were no longer permitted to do so, Henry and Owen drove the six miles back to the house, in order to ask the grandfather to return with them to town.
“It won’t work, Granddad. I seen the dam,” said Owen.
Each time, equally, they were refused.
When the water began to rise, and still Henry’s father and two other residents remained, the police intervened: they came around in a borrowed boat and picked everyone up like it was a carpool. Owen went along. He sat beside Henry and two of the officers in the bow, and so was the first to notice his grandfather from some distance away. How he was standing, his hands by his sides, on the porch, where the water had now reached the uppermost step, wetting his shoes. One of the officers leaned forward, causing the boat to lilt heavily to one side. He winked at Owen, and handed him the megaphone, which turned out to be surprisingly heavy in his hand. Then, though he hardly knew that he had spoken, Owen heard his own voice, scattered and exaggerated in the air.
When finally the grandfather stepped from the porch over the boat’s rail, he held Owen’s shoulder in order to steady himself, and then – as though it was an umbrella in heavy wind, and unaware that he did so – he continued to hold it, long after he had settled next to Henry and Owen on a low bench in the bow.
4
While my father drank and did crosswords and watched rented DVDs up at the house, I began to spend more and more time down at the water, with Henry. We’d take the boat out and, as in my childhood, spend the days putting in and around the coves, or on still days, just sit for hours out in the middle of the lake with Henry’s fishing line dropped straight down, though he never seemed to catch anything that way.
When I was younger, and we had come to Henry’s house alone in those solitary summers of my father’s disappearance, I had imagined that the past really existed, semi-submerged, in Henry’s backyard. Wouldn’t that be enough for anyone? I’d thought. To explain that certain sadness, which I identified sometimes in him. A sadness that would make you, when you saw it, want to pull the edges of your own life up around you, and stay there, carefully, inside.
Now, though, I find it difficult to believe that anything is ever buried in the way that I had once supposed. I believe instead that everything remains. At the very limit; the exact surface of things. So that in the end it is not so much what has been subtracted from a life that really matters, but the distances, instead, between the things which remain.
It was always a bit of a thing getting Henry into the boat from his chair, but then he was so happy there, and seemed more comfortable, his thin legs folded beneath him, where he did not need them. Occasionally, he would reach out an arm and bark out for me to stop if I was the one driving, and then we would just float a bit on the water and look around and we would stay very quiet together for a while, like that. We didn’t talk about my father, or the fact that he was dying. Or about Helen, and how angry she had been that he was drinking again. How she had spat fiercely at me over the phone, Why don’t you do something?
Or about my own life, and the things that I had and had not left behind, and whether or not I would find some other sort of life now, and what sort of life that would be.
I didn’t ask Henry any questions on our trips, as I did sometimes in the evenings when he told me stories, and he didn’t ask me any either.
There were questions I would have liked to ask, though, and sometimes I’d wondered them aloud to my father or to Helen. Why Henry had never married again, for example. And, of course, about Owen.
Once my father said, women think that they can make sad things go away by knowing the reason that they happened. This was in dismissal of a question that I asked him once about his experiences in the war. He told me that in my curiosity I was just like my mother, and in the tone that he said it I knew that at that moment it was the worst thing of all.
So I never mentioned the war to him again, until those many years later, when he told me himself.
I did believe that, I guess. That I could make sad things go away. Believed that if I knew what had happened to Henry (he had never spoken until that summer of his accident) that I could prevent an accident like that ever happening to myself, or to any of the people that I loved.
Believed, I suppose, that if there was a precise reason that I could get hold of to explain why Henry, and both of my parents ended up so very much alone, that I could prevent, for myself, an equivalent loneliness.
For the most part, though, I was more or less content in those days: sitting out with Henry on the lake. Cutting the motor when he asked me to, and drifting in silence with him. Hauling up the outboard when we passed over the old foundations, and dropping long lines into the water with heavy sinkers to catch nothing, even in a long afternoon.
My own sadness seemed, at those times, to draw itself in – a complete and separate object – so that it seemed to have nothing to do with me anymore. Just as Henry’s sadness seemed, on those afternoons, to have very little to do with him, and the things I had always supposed to be its source. We floated over the old town with such ease, after all, and I sensed not even the smallest regret in Henry then. No, it was not the lost town, or even, it seemed, the details of his life since – even the horribly sad things – that his sadness had to do with. All of it had happened so long ago, and it’s true that people, as Henry said himself, get on with things. With greater or lesser degrees of success, but anyway, get on with things, after long periods of time like that.
No, it had to do, instead, I think – that sadness – with those certain smells or shapes or colours that call up a certain moment, or a feeling, just a whiff of one, that you can’t quite place. Just something that fills you with a weird longing, all of a sudden. Like you’re homesick. Only not for any place that you’ve been to. And the smell, it doesn’t remind you of anything that you’ve ever smelled before. And the colour or the shape is not one you can connect to a recallable landscape.
5
Then, in the middle of July, I woke once more to the sounds of my father’s primeval shouts. They travelled up the two flights of stairs to Owen’s third-floor room as before, but this time there was a different sort of urgency that I heard in my father’s voice. An echo of something, almost forgotten. As though whatever it was had reverberated there in his lungs for many years, only now to reach me.
When, some time later, I joined Henry and my father in the kitchen, I saw that there was a book out on the table in the place where a crossword would otherwise have been. When he saw me, my father gave another quick whoop and a shout and opened the book to the page that he had marked with his thumb – an illustration of The Petrel – and I knew then that it was the boat that had remained, echoing in my father all those years, and which he once again wanted to begin.
The boat had continued to live – ever since the day my mother had removed it from Roddy Stewart’s shed in Mexico, paid him the fifty dollars in cash that he figured he was owed, and driven it to Orono, an hour and a half away – at my grandmother’s house. So that for the intervening eighteen years, until my father pointed to it as though at random in the open pages of a book, the boat had sat in my grandmother’s barn at the end of the dirt track of the drive, just the way that it had sat before, in Roddy Stewart’s shed. Only there, it was shat upon by so many gen
erations of pigeons that it appeared as though it had indeed been a seagoing vessel, covered in tough barnacles from head to toe. Because nothing at my grandmother’s house had ever finally, or irreversibly, been thrown out, the barn served as the last resting place for many items of little, or suspended, meaning, and the boat became for me, like the other objects (the several generations’ worth of discarded bicycles, unusable furniture and ruined lumber), a rare artifact; as though it existed, disembodied from human origin, in a separate, more probable world of its own.
I think that I forgot, in fact, the way that boat was connected to my family at all. The way it had seemed at one time to tear my mother in two, and received from her both the fierce anger and pride which she also bestowed upon Helen and me. Because no one but myself ever went up to the barn, except to deposit more objects into the growing collection, I was able to establish the boat in my own, more private and less complicated system; I don’t think I even realized that it was unfinished. To me, it was enough that the boat existed there, unused, in our barn. That it was shat upon by generations of pigeons. That it sailed only in my imagination.
I would be surprised, for example, to hear my mother speak offhandedly one day of the boat’s eventual completion.
“Why else do you think,” she said, “that we kept it all these years!” Not realizing that I had long given up, if it had ever existed in me, the sense that grown-up people did or did not do things for particular reasons.
I was not a child anymore at the time that my mother spoke of finishing the boat. My father had resurfaced; I believe I was nearly twenty. And though I did not ask my mother about the other articles that had been left in the barn, in a flash I imagined the whole collection of defunct lawn furniture, sofa beds and unserviceable engine parts, after years of idleness and dehabilitation, springing suddenly to life.
“Your grandmother always wished that I would just throw it out,” my mother said to me once, incredulously. And there appeared again that same look that often had appeared in her eye when speaking to Helen or me. In which, even in the semi-moment of its inception, we felt ourselves to be so extraordinarily loved that it took the breath out of us all at once, in a rush. Shot through with an affection so fierce that it mingled in us with an equivalent sense of terror: at the amount that we had already taken from her, and also from the world, which we feared that we would never quite be able, or even willing, to return.
I hope that now, when I go on to say that my father – having leaned from the book and removed his finger from the page that I now held open, having given a loud guffaw, followed by a low cough – then rose from the table in order to telephone my mother, it will be in some way understood, the vast and irremediable wound that we inflicted on her in that summer, my father’s last, when we extracted the boat from my grandmother’s barn and drove it north to Casablanca.
It had been a surprise to learn that the boat had also remained, for my father, linked to the initial promise with which it had been born. My father had never spoken to us of the boat, except in passing, and because of this I had, I suppose, always assumed that for him, as for me, any tangible notion of the boat’s completion had been relegated to the distant and unrecoverable past.
My mother’s protestations went unheeded. I – and even Helen, though she was still hardly speaking to him – took my father’s side. I think now that we even hoped with the boat, even in the idea of it, to replace my father’s Fargo palace, for which we felt accountable somehow.
It’s funny, isn’t it? The way that we always position ourselves at the centre of our own stories, and that even from some distance – even relegated to the third person, and, from the present tense at least two times removed – we continue to imagine ourselves in that way. It shouldn’t, for example, have taken me so many years to realize that what I had for so long referred to as my father’s boat was indeed my father’s boat; far more so anyway than it ever had been – or would be – mine.
Or taken still more years to realize that it was far less his than it was my mother’s; built as it had been out of an extraordinary love for her, which had continued, throughout everything, and was why, after all those years, he had thought of the boat at all.
Or, similarly, that the story that I was telling was not my own. That I would never be able to understand it – not my own life, and certainly not the lives of others – because even the simplest things appeared to me to be the most complicated puzzles, for which I had only the most inadequate of clues. And that, by reading backwards along the lives of objects, and the things that I had learned piecemeal from my parents, and from the rest of the world, I was only being thrown farther and farther off course, and was by now very far from the straight and deep waters for which I had always felt I was somehow bound. And that, each time I’d thought I was coming closer to that unknown region I desired, I was actually following altogether a different route; a small estuary quite sideways to that true course of things, ending up in distant and uncomfortable regions I had never dreamed of visiting before.
Is it only now, through aggravation at the continued frustration of my attempts, or is it an accidental wisdom that somehow I’ve acquired? Which leads me finally to believe that the small estuaries to which I have been blown are just as true as the rest, and that the deep and open and still untried waters have been left uncharted because they do not in fact exist at all; except, that is, in the magic lantern pictures of my mind where they are just a simple shadow-play of death, which someday, and far too soon, will have us all freely sailing there.
6
On the day the boat was taken from the barn, Helen and I climbed into the upper loft where, years before, it had been relegated in order to afford room below for the increasing number of objects which collected there. With the help of two neighbours, along with my father, who wheezed in the wings and shouted directions to us through the barn’s wide doors, we lowered the boat very slowly to the ground. From there we were able to move it easily onto Henry’s old boat trailer, which we had borrowed for the occasion, and there it roosted, after having made the effort on untried wings and after many years: outdoors. As though it had never doubted itself at all. As though it had, in fact, very little to do with my father, or even with my mother, who sat fuming in the kitchen, in order that she would not cry. As though it had nothing to do with human beings at all. With keeping things, or not keeping things. With patterns, or with the systems of memory that we construct: the arrangement of object to object, one against the other, in our lives.
My father, as he leaned against the boat, catching his breath for the thousandth time, looked as though he were a hundred years old. So small, suddenly, beside the boat that everything seemed reversed somehow. As if it was the boat that had been waiting for him, and not he for it. And it was only at that moment that I realized. That I felt it, in the pit of my belly, as if it were my own: the great wound that was opening in my mother’s heart, as my father caught his breath and leaned against the boat’s side, and my sister Helen tied the straps to the boat with panache, and Henry, looming from his chair by the car door, surveyed everything with unquiet eyes, as though sensing something in the wind.
Helen, with her practical sense of things, had, throughout the weeks of a lingering feud, said only, “This is driving me crazy. It’s a fucking boat.” Not realizing, or choosing to overlook, that the heart of the matter lay in that very thing: that it was not the significance, but rather that the boat failed to signify anything at all that really mattered. That it had come, that is, for my mother, to represent through its very blankness that secret, unknown quantity with which she had one day hoped to solve the problem of our lives.
But there was no formula that day, and even my sadness I kept to myself and did not allow to blend or to combine in any way: with the sadnesses of my mother, for example – also isolate – as she came out bravely from the house and walked to the end of the drive, to stand beside the window and to kiss my father on the lips, with tears standing in
her eyes, though she did not acknowledge them; that by not brushing them away she perhaps intended were not there.
Thinking all that time, not now of the boat, which had perhaps in this moment realized most completely what my sister and I had hoped for it – its object-ness – but of my father, who was suddenly, unbearably, old. And that, in all probability, it had come only to this, that this was the ultimate reach of the story which they had made of their lives. That no matter how variously they had dreamt the end, it had arrived, and there was nothing to be undone, and nothing to be retained.
Or of the sadnesses of my father. Who, though he was in a jovial mood (slapping Henry on the back, and opening his third can of beer that morning, after my mother had stepped back from the car), must have contained it as well.
No, it was only a small and a personal sadness which I harboured in me then, I could do no better. A sadness which could at that time have no outlet, because of the position that we had taken, Helen and I: that it would be possible for the boat to be reduced in such a way, to its object form, alleviated of twenty-five years and all they had contained. Of the great and always ill-fitting imposition of meaning on form. That it could be set free, as we ourselves on that afternoon believed that we might be. As Helen snapped pictures of the boat disappearing from the dirt track of my grandmother’s road, and Henry and my father and I began our drive away – from the safety of my mother’s keeping – all the way to Ontario, and the boat’s bow puffed like the throat of a bird who, in lifting itself from the ground, had already forgotten that it had ever been held there, and had cut all ties.
We arrived back at the government house on a Tuesday, but it wasn’t until Friday afternoon that we managed finally to transfer the boat from the trailer into Henry’s garage. Following my father’s instructions, we constructed two blocks on which the boat could rest, and from which position it would be possible to properly begin.
The Sentimentalists Page 7
