Then, just as the arms of the clock on the china cabinet indicated five minutes to the hour, the sound of a car motor reached our ears. Grandma, who had decked herself out in her finest duds and costume jewellery, smoothed her dress down over her thighs, gave me a significant look, and said, “Like I told you earlier, I won’t be going out with you. Me he just gets a look at through the window. But I’ll be able to see whatever goes on out there, so you’d better do as you’re told. We been through it plenty of times, so don’t pretend you forgot what you are supposed to do. One more time now. You hand him the gun and then what?”
“I say, ‘The last thing in the world I want is anything that you ever touched or would remind me of you, Mr. Fancy Foster,’ ” I mumbled reluctantly.
“You bet,” said Grandma. “That’ll tighten his tourniquet for him. He won’t be expecting that welcome. He thinks this is some kind of kiss-and-make-up party. Kiss my ass and make up a face after, Mr. Fancy Foster,” said Grandma. Out in the yard we heard the car stop. “Out you go!” barked Grandma. “Now!”
Uncle Cecil was combing his hair in the rear-view mirror when he saw me crossing the yard to his automobile, pump gun in my hands. He sort of spilled himself out of the car and rushed at me in an eager, stumbling trot. “Oh, Charlie,” he said, “how good it is to see you after all this time! How good it is to have this terrible misunderstanding cleared up at last!”
He broke off as I shoved the gun at him with both hands. “Here!” I shouted. “Take it!”
“Whatever does this mean, Charlie.…” Dazed, he limply accepted the rifle I pressed on him. In the last nine or ten days he had grown worn, haggard, and shaky-looking. His eyes had the fogged, bleary quality of a very old man’s, the misted look of a bathroom mirror after someone has taken a hot shower. He needed a shave and his beard appeared to be sprouting out of damp chalk dust. Encountered at close range he was different from the funny little man I had looked down on from the heights of a barn loft.
“I’m giving it back,” I said. “I don’t want nothing from you.”
“It’s her, isn’t it?” he said.
Trying to evade his eyes, I lifted mine to the sky. A mob of crows was in a slow boil above the windbreak, disturbing the sky with a ragged, awkward, black quarrel.
All at once Uncle Cecil began a broken, urgent, disconnected ramble. I must never believe her, believe the things she had accused him of. I knew better. I did know better, didn’t I? Of course. There was nothing to reproach himself with. We both knew that. He knew in his own mind there was nothing to what she had said. Ugly talk. Rumours. Unfounded suppositions. To think he would hurt a child in any way. There wasn’t an ounce of harm in him. If he had even the smallest doubt that there was, he’d take steps … but there wasn’t. People didn’t understand there were no boundaries to friendship. They didn’t believe young and old could be best of friends. But they could. Like Alan Breck and David Balfour. We had been the best of friends, hadn’t we? Yes. Yes. Yes.
On the final yes the gun slipped from his fingers and dropped to the ground beside him. Covering his face with his palms, he stood mute under the bright, hot light. Moments passed and still he said nothing, did nothing, except stand at attention with his face in his hands like a prisoner awaiting pronouncement of sentence. I glanced back over my shoulder to the window where my grandmother was posed in her black dress, scrutinizing us. She made no sign as to what I should do.
And then I thought I heard Uncle Cecil say something. I turned back to him, straining to catch the soft voice muffled by the soft hands. “Charlie,” he said, “tell me that you only hid from me because she made you. Tell me that, Charlie.”
I couldn’t answer.
“Say you didn’t hide from me.”
I didn’t cry much as a kid. I cried so little my mother actually worried about me. But I was so near crying that day that I moved alongside Uncle Cecil and placed my arm loosely around his waist. For a time he stood stock still, blind, then his body relaxed and a hand came down to rest lightly on the nape of my neck.
I heard the screen door slap behind her when Grandma Bradley stepped out of the house.
Things As They Are?
A MONASTERY SURROUNDED by fields of lush grain, girdled by dark pines. Iron bells ringing the morning stars out of the skies and the black crows into them. A dusty road at noon, butterflies in the ditches folding brown and yellow wings on purple-headed thistles, stooped monks pulling weeds in a distant garden. A young man greatly afflicted in body but ardent to serve God. A setting and a character for a nineteenth-century story, most probably Russian. Last of all, a writer.
The monastery, like nearly all ecclesiastical establishments in the latter half of the twentieth century, had fallen on hard times. Each year the number of postulants dwindled and the surviving monks grew older, feebler, greyer. The boys’ boarding school attached to the abbey was forced to close and farming operations were curtailed. But as the abbot was fond of saying, “New circumstances create new challenges.” The monastery welcomed busy Catholic laity seeking to examine and test their souls in solitude, some of whom left substantial testimonials of appreciation upon departing. In time, reports of the monastery’s natural beauty and isolation reached the ears of other, more secular-minded individuals eager to make a temporary withdrawal from the world, sort through their lives – “find themselves,” as so many of them passionately put it. These, too, the abbey was willing to accept, charging ridiculously small sums for the provision of room and board, unlimited fresh air, and restorative quiet. All that was asked of these guests was that they behave modestly and decently, and permit the monks to go about their business undisturbed.
It was an old friend, a poet concerned that Jack Greer seemed to do nothing whole-heartedly any more but booze, who suggested a retreat to the Alberta monastery might lend Jack’s infamously stalled book the push it needed to get moving again. For the first time in living memory, Greer acted on someone’s advice, applied to the monastery, and was accepted.
The monk who greeted him upon his arrival at the abbey inspected a tall, bony, angular, sad-faced man, at least forty but probably older, whose hair was cropped so short it was difficult to detect the grey in it. He reminded Brother Ambrose a little of the convict Magwitch in the David Lean film of Great Expectations which Brother Lawrence had used to show in English classes in those long ago days when the boys’ school was still in operation and he was still a teacher. Of course, Brother Ambrose couldn’t know that Greer’s hair had been cut only two days earlier to foster a certain disposition. What Greer was aiming at was simplicity, discipline, control. A monastery seemed the place to achieve these things. He was travelling light all around, a pair of Adidas on his feet, six shirts still in cellophane, and an equal number of tan work-pants bearing sale tags packed in his large knapsack. The only things that weren’t new were his socks and underwear, a portable typewriter, and a dog-eared manuscript, five and a half years old. For reading he had Chekhov’s Selected Letters, the Viking Portable Chekhov, and a copy of Goethe’s Faust, nothing more. These were books to clear the head, lift the fog, correct the drift.
Greer was giving himself three months to finish the book and get his life in order. Almost six years ago he had published a first novel that went beyond being a modest success and stopped just short of being truly celebrated. Suddenly agent and publisher began to talk to him about his “career,” making him feel like one of those young men who have passed bar exams or been accepted into medical school. But six years was a long time between books and nobody talked to him like that any more. He was a fucking walking disaster and knew it.
But maybe here it would be possible to make himself fit to write again. He would read Chekhov and Goethe, hike hard in the countryside, eat well, sleep better, cut back his drinking. The bottles of brandy clinking in his knapsack were to be strictly rationed, no more than three drinks a day no matter how badly the work went. There was a shot glass for measuring so he couldn’t cheat.
Brother Ambrose led him down a seemingly endless corridor, unlocked the door to a room so bare it nearly made Greer shiver, and then carefully pointed out where everything was, desk closet, chair, bed. It was all obvious but Greer supposed the monk considered the room tour part of his job. In the doorway, before leaving, Brother Ambrose said: “There’s only the two of you.”
For a second Greer had no inkling what he was talking about.
“There’ll be more arriving throughout the summer,” Brother Ambrose continued, “but for the time being there’s only you and one other gentleman in this wing.” Having said that, he departed, leaving Jack to turn his attention to his new home.
There wasn’t much to hold it. The walls were painted white. There were no pictures. The bathroom was the sort found in a hospital. On the wall directly above the desk there was a crucifix.
Greer opened a window and lay down on his bed. The scent of damp hay lying in windrows came drifting in, smelling yeasty and sweet. The silence of the building was absolute except when a door closed somewhere at the ends of the earth. Through the open window he heard insects sizzling and thrumming in the hot grass, the ripple of a meadow lark, a hawk’s rusty shriek, the dry clattering of a woodpecker, sounds that he had presumed were extinct. He thought of Chekhov and his love for his six hundred acres at Melikhovo. Spring in the countryside had given his favourite Russian hope there would be spring in paradise.
Clean slate, Greer promised himself. New start.
The next morning the tolling of the bells shook him out of sleep, chapel bells summoning the monks to some service. Greer turned on his side and looked out the window while the bells rang relentlessly. A skim of spreading light, a milky flush in the eastern sky told him how very early it was. Abruptly, the bells broke off and in the sudden silence he heard muffled grunts and groans, a dull thumping and scraping outside his door as if something very awkward and very heavy was being lugged down the corridor. Curious, Greer climbed out of bed, eased open his door, and peered out. Except for red exit lights shining at either end, the corridor was in darkness. In the bloody light of the furthest of these exit lights, Greer could see a man starkly silhouetted.
The man hauled nothing down the passageway but himself.
Propped on crutches, he dragged legs encumbered by heavy braces, propelling them forward with violent spasms of effort, groaning as he swung on his crutches and his lifeless legs struck the floor rhythmically, again and again, with a dull, metallic clunk. Throwing himself at the swinging door, he drove it recklessly open with his braced legs, rattled through, and disappeared from sight. Behind the door lay chapel and monastery proper. Was he answering the call of the bells?
Greer hurried back to bed. Although it was June, what he had just seen left him feeling cold.
In the mornings following, Greer found himself waking earlier and earlier in anticipation of the unholy racket in the hallway. It was deeply unsettling, but he could hardly complain about what the unfortunate man couldn’t help. Still, Greer was losing sleep and, worse, the whispered mutterings and groans got his working day off to a bad start, lent it a troubling, slightly surreal air.
I came to write a book and instead I find myself starring in a Bergman film, Greer told himself, trying to laugh it off.
But the Bergman film continued, even out of doors. Strolling in the monastery grounds Greer was astounded by the number of elderly, disabled monks he encountered: hunchbacks and clubfoots, the mildly retarded and profoundly disfigured. Meeting handicapped brothers on the gravelled paths, he hurried by them with nothing more than a curt nod of the head. He couldn’t help himself. The sight of them, infirmities cloaked in medieval-looking habits, increased his free-floating anxiety. For Greer, the whole place was taking on a gothic air.
He discreetly questioned Diane, one of the women who served in the dining hall reserved for the abbey’s guests, about the handicapped monks and she explained. Fifty years ago, Catholic parents concerned about what might happen to a disabled son after they died would encourage him to seek to become a brother in the monastery. If he were accepted, his parents were assured they need never worry about his future; he had a home for the rest of his life and would be taken care of. What Greer was seeing, she said, was the last generation, now old men, left in the care of the Church.
Then one evening when Greer was sitting in the empty visitors’ lounge playing a game of solitaire before supper, someone entered the room and dropped himself into a chair. When Greer looked up and saw the crutches and braces, he knew this was the disturber of his sleep, the cripple who groaned his way down the hallway every morning. The surprise was his face.
Greer bobbed his head politely, said hello, and immediately turned his attention back to the cards to avoid staring. The man in the armchair had at one time been horribly burned, so hideously burned that his features had been reduced to an expressionless mask of livid scar tissue that resembled the scales of a reptile. His mouth was a lipless slit, his nose a snake-snout, his blue eyes puckered in flesh as lifeless as plasticine. He had neither eyebrows, eyelashes, nor whiskers, and the bald dome of his skull was stippled with slick, shiny scars that looked like drippings from a wax candle.
Greer’s distaste shamed him, but that didn’t make it any less real. He kept thinking how much the man looked like a lizard. No matter how hard he tried to concentrate on the game of solitaire, Greer could sense the stranger watching him, sense the man’s rigidity; his blank, fixed face, his legs thrust stiffly out from the chair as if they were planks nailed to his body and not really limbs at all. And Greer began to feel his own body going rigid too, brittle with tension, unease, anticipation.
When the man suddenly spoke to him, Greer started violently. “Pardon me?” he said, confused.
“You’re one pitiful solitaire player,” the man repeated. Greer looked hard and recognized an ironic, challenging intelligence gleaming in the eyes of the frozen face. The slash of mouth widened and Greer assumed it was a smile.
“Says who?”
“Five of hearts on six of spades! There!” the stranger said pecking at the cards with his fingers. They were hooked like the talons of a bird of prey, several of them lacking nails.
Jack moved the card. “Maybe I ought to surrender the deck to the expert,” he said, “and learn something.”
The young man held up his hands. “I’m a clumsy shuffler and dealer. It takes me a long time to play a game.”
“Well, my head obviously isn’t in it,” said Greer. “Let me lay a game out and you can shift the cards. How does that strike you?”
The fellow extended a claw. “Roland Madox.”
Jack reached for it. “Jack Greer,” he said.
That night the two men ate supper together in the separate guest dining room. Madox explained he was not a monk yet and was only at the abbey on trial, working in the library until the abbot arrived at a decision as to whether he truly had a vocation. For the present, said Madox, he was free to choose where and with whom he ate. Over the abbey’s famous fare – farmer’s sausage, sauerkraut, boiled beet tops, and new potatoes, followed by apple crisp and ice cream – Roland Madox told his story. When he was five, he and his grandfather had been involved in a car accident. The old man had been instantly killed when he pulled out into the path of an oncoming fuel truck. His grandson, however, had survived the wreck and conflagration with disabling spinal injuries and third-degree burns over eighty per cent of his body. With a kind of perverse defiance Madox mockingly referred to himself as a “fry.” According to his self-portrait, perversity seemed second nature to him. The night of the accident, the doctors said he wouldn’t see morning. When morning came they didn’t give him a week. When a week passed, not another month. On the burn ward everyone expected him to succumb to infection. Nothing doing. He had survived the burn ward, years of hospitalization and rehabilitation. Here he was, twenty-five years old, still defying the odds. He had battled his way through elementary school, endured the adole
scent hell of high school, earned a university degree in history. Implausibly, it was in a university philosophy class that he had discovered the existence of God, a startling reversal of what Greer took to be the customary outcome of acquaintance with academic philosphers. Now he was determined to become a monk.
When Greer inquired as to why he had this particular ambition, the answer was simple. “I love God,” he said. Adding, “There’s not many things I can do as well as the next guy – but praying is one of them.”
At last the two men rose and went out into the calm sunshine, the blue shadows, the summer stillness which descends on the prairie only after the day’s wind has blown itself out in the grass, or the sky, or has lost itself beyond the brackets of earth and horizon. Greer, at that moment, had no inkling of what he had embarked upon.
After ten days, Greer had still to write a word worth keeping. This place, this monastery, didn’t seem to be the solution either. All day he exhausted himself with the struggle and when evening came he lay on his bed watching the sky through his window, a sky as pale as a bowl of cream. At such times he often thought of Miriam, where she was, how she was, and especially of the night in that quiet street, the Herengracht, outside their hotel in Amsterdam. Miriam, who had stood by him for the four years he was writing the book that was supposed to change his life, and who had remained steadfastly loyal for the three more difficult ones which followed it.
Gazing over the canal, she had asked him exactly what it was he wanted. Because on how many occasions past had she heard him claim that all he wanted was a book, one book to prove to himself he was a writer. Well, he had got his book but it hadn’t made him happy. Now he claimed it was a disappointment to him. And the new book he was writing disappointed him even more. When was it going to stop? When was he going to get this bad taste out of his mouth?
Miriam told him these things in a calm, agreeable voice, without a trace of the anger she was so richly entitled to. While she did, Greer kept his eyes fixed on the oily, yellow blur of light on the canal, reflections of the windows of the tall, narrow houses that hedged it in, afraid to tell her how afraid he was of failure. A fine, misty rain hung quivering in the air between them like a veil.
Things As They Are? Page 20
