by Rudy Wiebe
lead me, Lord, lead me in Thy righteousness,
make Thy way plain before my …
the psalm soaked forever in his choir memory sang through him like radiance.
How could it be Gabriel? Gone a quarter of a century.
There were police flashers now at Whyte Avenue and 104th Street … and he sweating cold in shirtsleeves, his parka and beaver cap on that chair. His coffee mug.
A siren wailed long and low and longer to his left: out of the slanting snow a massive Fire Rescue truck lumbered past, lights aflame like a blazing bush.
Gabriel … my son my son, did I see my …
And an ambulance.
He realized he was tipped sideways, clutching the granite corner of his bank … credit card, chequing account, semi-annual RRIF … he groped along the front into the inset door, the shelter of the ATM vestibule. The yellow-vested guard stood beyond the inner door smiling as always, but suddenly his mouth fell open, staring. Hal turned to the farthest bank machine, forcing his frozen fingers to dig out his wallet. Why was he here? He would never find an orange downfill by glaring at his bank card, shoving it in the slot. The surveillance cameras were certainly reading him in shirt and snow so he deliberately coded in 6-1-8-5 and waited, counting in his mind by hundreds slowly, slowly, and then swiftly jabbed himself out again. He yanked the card free and wheeled, pushed through the door without glancing at the guard who would certainly remember him, he was always there smiling like any terminally retired idiot, out into colder snow.
Traffic lanes, the median trees on Whyte. Before him nothing moved. He had managed to empty six lanes on one of the busiest streets in Edmonton. As fast as he could he jay-walked across, shuddering, his arms were freezing and his wet feet staggering so badly his right leg hooked and very nearly sprawled him onto the median but he caught himself upright against a lean tree, panting, the Christmas lights wound there all year and then he was over, could tilt into the corner of Ten Thousand Villages where he volunteered one afternoon a week, thank God yesterday, could rest with only his stomach heaving empty down to the bile. His aching leg. Through the window the mahogany Ganesha offered him incomprehensible wisdom—but he desperately needed—get away from here. If Yvonne looked out from behind the counter … step out, walk as calmly as any ridiculous old bare-headed-in-the-snow pedestrian past shops and the trackless alley—no one had walked there as far as he could see—back to the coffee shop at the corner of 104th. A cluster of people, silent, hunched profiles shifting, glinting faintly in patrol car and high Fire Rescue and ambulance colours. The inset door handle seemed frozen steel to his bare hands but he jerked it open without losing skin. Becca straightened up from the shaky coffee table. She was holding his silver mug.
To pick up his parka he had to steady a numb hand on her arm. She flinched, but turned into him. Her perfect arm, strong, so warm, to hold a body warm, a living body.
She said into his ear, “What about that?” and gestured outside.
“No! No … I don’t want to be … no …”
“Okay.” She was so calm; she had served him coffee for centuries. “I don’t remember you here today.”
“No,” he said as softly, knowing what she meant, “No, don’t—”
She took his hand and nudged it with her cheek. The shop was empty but for eternal Ben bent into his computer screen as if no whirling lights existed, his virtual genealogies never-unending in time and space. For an instant Becca’s cheek brushed Hal again.
“You sometimes come in for coffee, sure, but no one will say,” she said. “Nothing.”
She was holding the other sleeve of his parka for him. He said, “They’ll check your surveillance.”
“They can’t if we don’t let them. It’s our camera.”
“Say nothing, okay, if you can, but if your boss—if something really bad …” he glanced towards the intersection. The lights swirling, the jacket backs of people. “Don’t perjure yourself about me, please.”
She touched his hand as he lifted his beaver cap, even as she turned away and gave him his mug, going. How could a teenage girl on minimum-wage boredom contain such gentilesse? God, you are good. He stuffed the cup in his parka pocket and walked out, shoved at the corner post to wheel himself north away from the crowd and the intersection heap of several crumpled—he wouldn’t look. The ambulance whooped once, yowled, then roared away in the direction of the University Hospital. But he was past the women’s boutique, the bar, across 83rd no matter what the light and lanes of idling cars, he forced himself to tramp on, his right side an agony at each step, good. And the funeral home squatting there—HOME—a grotesque word to nail on a dreadful necessity; the parking lot with its perfect hearse always waiting, waiting … never again, they would have to carry him in.
The world was covered white. Muttering with motionless cars and no snow falling.
Past the funeral building the air sifted gentle, almost warm against his face, snipping at spring suddenly. The tall stained glass of Blessed Redeemer Church where Owl stowed his stuff behind the lilac bush when it flowered in May against the brick wall and where he sometimes slept. Home, he would get there, yes only one more intersection to get across, then railroad tracks, the alley, the giant boulevard ash trees flaring over his snow-lined apple tree trimmed no taller than he could reach and ready to bloom whiter than snow Lord wash me and I shall be, here, home.
He lay on his back on the kitchen floor. Breathing. He had managed to claw off his boots at the back door and toss aside his beaver cap and zip open his parka but that was it. The kitchen linoleum softened by the down parka. Blond cupboards all around over him, fridge starting with its tiny quiver. The house held him as it had for twenty-three years, precisely there, contained and complete in his mind to every space and shelf and door and stair-step, the main floor where he sprawled, the crowded basement, the second floor with the bedroom and long office and bath and sunroom and landing open to the stair and balcony rail and peaked ceiling of the third floor with the foam mat …
His mug was still hooked in his fingers.
On the floor. A presumably dignified middle-class seventy-five-year-old male laid out flat; an Emeritus Professor at “one of Canada’s great universities” who had a few dozen mentions on Google, even a three-line bio in Wikipedia because he once edited an anthology of short stories that thousands of students were required to read, a world selection of thirty-five stories in English that included seven Canadian authors, such a brilliant 1967 idea to include Centennial Canadians in “the world” that wrote readable stories, at last, how many teachers thanked him. For a few years he had needed a business accountant to prepare his income tax and even wrestled with writing stories himself, three were actually published in very little magazines and he had occasionally thought he might be a “late-to-mature” writer, briefly laboured to convince himself. Flat on his kitchen floor tasting bile and his back held rigid above the ache, the right leg; white-hair and nose at the furnace vent below the sink. Warm air, breathing.
He should be lying on their ancient camper-foam mattress on the third floor where he napped every afternoon and awoke to the pine ceiling with its dark knots slanted together over him. He was certain that some day, ultimately, he would recognize those knot constellations fixed in pine as the patterns of unfathomable stars he saw when he stared into the night sky from the cabin deck at Aspen Creek. He searched and believed, certainly; some day, but never yet. Though the ceiling remained constant, and also the end wall of great arched windows where the winter sun was always sinking when he awoke.
Yolanda’s arch. She had re-designed every detail so perfectly, the entire old house.
The floor hard through his parka. Owl lay in his parka every night, all year, somewhere hard, but he had four mattresses on four different floors where he could turn. Nurse oblivion.
Yolanda took over the house design when the architect annoyed her once too often … sweetest sweetest Yo, such a taker-over … 216 days, almost to the h
our, gone. Their year of final knowing had at first seemed to wither timelessly: four weeks of travel and distant relatives who did not know what to say to them in England and Germany, and two weeks of a planned month on an “island paradise” of walking more slowly together along the golden beach and sitting under palm fronds and seeing the sea lick itself over the sand, so fully complete and forever unto itself, until they suddenly knew they must flee, home, back to Edmonton where daughter Miriam in Vancouver and son Dennis in Toronto could schedule quick flights, their lifetime of friends could call or visit any day if they wanted them. Then one morning Yo could not stand; she could not so much as sit up. So horrifyingly quicker than any doctor had the nerve to anticipate, a sudden skeleton under sheets in a palliative bed at the Grey Nuns despite every known technology and enormous needled monitoring machines. Shrinking. Bones. Gone.
The fear of death, the intensifying anticipation of death, the dread, the stiffening brutality, the relief … the guilt-ridden relief of unstoppable death. Nothing but massive memory to remember, to forget, and there it was, back, any time and there it is again, any forgotten and unforgivable weight of it, any fold or shrivel or loving … her strong arms pulling him tight, her open smile nuzzling moist into the bend of his neck. Their lifetime sleeping together in one tender bed.
Lying inert. Inertia. That inherent property by which matter will persist in a state of stillness until acted upon by some external force. The matter surrounding him so still … not a chair or sofa cushion had shifted its position since the last wailing ambulance took her. Not in the living room nor dining room nor kitchen, never had the lid of the Heintzman piano she played like a singing angel been lifted, and after the funeral he vowed nothing ever would until his back and balance staggered even more and he accidentally bumped something out of its place. When the cleaning people came, every two months, he drove his grey Celica to Aspen Creek or Drumheller or Lethbridge or Peace River for two days with nothing but landscape and sky and strangers and when he returned all was dusted and remained precisely where it belonged. He had so often teased her, As soon as I heard your name, I wanted to marry you because “yo” in Low German means “yes,” so when I called you, “Yo! Yo! Yolanda!” I was already always agreeing with you.
But not even to hear her laughter could he say that to her at the last, their flat-footed loving silliness. Nor move her last novel or hairbrush on her night table, nor water a plant. After she was gone the sunroom she had nurtured in magnificent green slowly filled with the shrunken sweetness of dry rot. Her piano harmonies were fading to whispers, but for a time the scent of dying flowers sifted over him when he fell asleep in the bedroom and when he awoke it was his gentle first awareness, but now after seven months he needed to look into the sunroom when he passed to see how nothing in it was left alive. Not even smell.
But he remembered the smell. That memory would not leave him.
“Yolanda.” He named her aloud flat on his back on the kitchen floor. Thinking to her: I’ve never watered your plants now shrivelled to heaps of dust nor opened a drawer in your dresser or shifted a blouse in the closet or fingered the keys of the piano you—Dennis disconnected the computer he taught you to use throughout his high school, it still sits there in your office full of everything you—I’ve never touched it, I’ve never touched one of those boxes on the basement shelves you packed and labelled GABRIEL in black felt pen. Yo, Yolanda, there’s no evening flower smell, not one single beloved movement in this house you built, now. Only certain memory. And silent rot, Yo, Yo, all that lives rots.
But not he. Not yet. Sadly. Why? An eighth decade of life barely oriented by a daily coffee walk and CBC news and library books and an Oiler game on TV if he could endure their play. Empty pathetic.
The Orange Downfill walked into the window. One instant … one breathlessness. And he happened to be looking there.
He rolled sideways, heaved erect until he was on his knees shivering. The counter edge steadied him to haul himself to his feet. It was too fast: his head swirled, he was hanging on as his leg buckled for an instant and gorge roiled in his gut, okay, hold on there’s nothing left to barf, barf nothing, here’s the sink, better the sink than spraying a public alley and behind his clenched eyelids light split and shifted, white to black into flaming orange and his nothing control broke: he saw the day cracked wide open to that remorseless memory always poised to strike. It waited there exactly, enormous beyond fathoming and framed in the mirror of what would never be forgotten no matter how many day by days he forced himself to convince himself he had smashed and ground it to dust.
That day of irreducible remember.
Sunday, September 8, 1985, 1:30 p.m. And he was alone.
“I hear you have a grief in the family.”
“What?”
His childhood friend Aaron’s voice on the phone, from Toronto, no greeting just—
“Hal … you are home!”
“Yes, yes, just walked in, the house is empty, nobody’s here—what ‘grief’?”
“Hal … you just? … nobody’s there?”
“Yes! Taxi straight from the airport, what are you saying?”
“Listen Hal,” suddenly frozen calm, “you call Dave, you call him, I’ll hang up right now and you call Dave right now.”
“What’re you saying!”
“God help you. Call Dave right now.”
The phone goes dead and instantly he is pounding Yolanda’s brother’s numbers, his mind frozen, and nothing happens, what—a dial tone!—his crashing hand finally finds a dial tone and he hits the numbers again and Dave speaks at the first ring, like a whisper,
“Yes?”
“Dave, I’m home, what’s happened, what?”
“We couldn’t find you, we were phoning every—”
“There’s nobody here! Yo—what happened!”
“The world has collapsed …”
Something breaks. “Gabriel.”
“Yes. He’s … gone … at the cabin he …”
Instantly he knows but he screams it anyway, “What do you mean ‘gone’!”
“Hal, listen, listen,” Dave’s voice slowly hardens into his rigid strength, “Gabriel … we couldn’t find you yesterday by phone or this morning and they all drove to the airport to meet your plane, don’t move, I’m coming, just stay, stay put, I’ll be right there,” and the phone is dead again.
Gone. The wall above the phone table is not gone. It is there. It is stopping his forehead, pounding it harder and harder and he feels nothing that is what walls do, be there to pound you, pound, Gabriel spoke to him five days ago, Tuesday, his voice alive in the phone, not this phone, the cream phone in his apartment and Hal on the black one in the Edmonton Airport, they were talking together when Canadian Pacific began calling his Montreal flight and Gabe agreed, sure, okay, they could meet Sunday and there could be something good to talk about when he got back from business in Montreal, this coming Sunday, okay, sure, bye.
“I love you.”
“Okay Dad, goodbye then.”
He said that five days ago. “I love you.” When had he actually said those words to his twenty-four-year-old son? But he had, yes he had. I love … Okay Dad. Goodbye then … On Tuesday.
He stands in the dining room bay window. Across the empty street the white boards of the community skating rink wait for winter ice. It is only September 8 but snow has fallen to hide the green grass sometime during the days he’s been away, it is melting, dripping off the birch and poplar leaves of their corner trees, the elementary school still hidden behind their patchy gold and white and red flickering. The corner where little Dennis always turns to wave at Yolanda here in this window, every day, before crossing to school. But older Gabriel had never waved, had never looked back walking away.
I love you.
Goodbye then.
All of them had been trying to phone him, they all knew where he should be in Montreal and what he was doing there and who he was with and he had called Yolanda
Friday evening from Montreal and she was fine, everything was fine; Gabe had come on Wednesday evening and borrowed the pickup to go shopping Thursday for shoes for Miriam’s wedding, he only had his worn joggers, fine, that was okay, and Yo knew Hal’s return flight on Sunday but oddly Gabriel hadn’t brought back the truck yet and hadn’t answered his phone, not yet, Friday—but now Dave said on Saturday, all day and evening Saturday and all this morning Sunday they had been calling everywhere they knew—even Aaron on the off chance that Hal had stopped in Toronto—but they couldn’t find him.
Of course they couldn’t. Nobody knew about Friday night and Saturday all day and Sunday morning, not even Yo was supposed to know, not yet.
And slowly, slowly he feels himself splitting. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the night gets in.
But Dave said “Gone.” “Gone” is not … maybe not O merciful sweet Jesus—
Dave’s green Dodge is at the curb, it is there, he was staring right there but he hadn’t seen it stop. How long can it possibly take for Yo’s brother to lunge out, slam the door, run around the car and up the walk and jump the two steps and across the porch and through the door he yanks open, he has more than enough endless time to know what he need never say aloud but Dave has wrapped him in his arms, clasps him fiercely heads over shoulders, is a machine gun of words set on automatic fire against his chest:
“… it was the blue cab of your pickup I saw it in the trees behind the shed at Aspen Creek, I come driving round the bend at the cabin Saturday morning and I saw Big Ed’s van there already so he’s working in the cabin and the sun glanced off something blue back behind the shed, in the trees there, everything was white, the trees hanging snow, it snowed Friday or maybe already Thursday night and the spruce still hanging—there were just Big Ed’s van tracks on the road coming in but no tracks to the shed and what was your blue pickup, that must be it, it was that blue, what’s it doing way back there in the trees, you never park there, you aren’t even home, I wouldn’t have seen it if the sun hadn’t glanced off, so sharp just once as I drove in so I parked and walked towards the shed to look and I remembered Yo calling Thursday about going out Saturday to the cabin to make more plans for Miriam’s wedding and I said I’d come too and she said Gabriel had borrowed your pickup Wednesday, but Thursday he wasn’t answering his phone and I got a stranger and stranger feeling walking past the shed and towards that truck, it was your Chev pickup all right, the light-blue cab and the white canopy, why was it there, backed in there like that, I was getting sort of scared and thinking only pickup, it’s backed so far into the little birches and poplars on that trail we cut to dig the root cellar, the small trees are so heavy and I shove past the hood, it’s covered with snow and look inside the cab and it’s empty, nothing on the seat. And the door’s unlocked. I can open it, and then I see the key in the starter, it’s turned on, all the way.
