by Rudy Wiebe
“So … I have to look in the back, into the canopy. Gabriel lying there, stretched out, face … staring up—”
“Dave! Dave!” He has to get him stopped, they are knee to knee on the living room couch and he has to hear him say it, “He’s dead? Dead, in back of the pickup?”
Dave stares over him at the wall. “I didn’t touch anything. Lying on his back. His eyes open. And that piece of hose from installing the dryer, it stuck into the canopy through the back window. I fell on my knees. It was taped … very neat, around the exhaust, duct tape … singed …”
They sit on the couch, crying face to face.
After a time Dave says, “I didn’t know what to do. What is there? On my knees in wet snow, those snowy little trees hiding me against the truck tire, just stay down, down … I’m praying it’s not true dearest God—and I remember Big Ed in the cabin and I get up and Gabriel’s naked face—I ran back like crazy, Big Ed would know, something, to do, he was up the stepladder sanding the balcony railing and I yelled at him come down, and I told him Gabriel is lying in the back of the pickup in the trees behind the shed. Big Ed went white, he couldn’t say a word and all I could say, ‘What do we do, what do we do?’ And then we hear the door, voices, Yo and Dennis and Miriam and her friends, someone laughing out loud at the silly snow, if it comes now there’ll be none left next weekend for the wedding! Big Ed and I can’t make a sound. But Yo sees us standing there, like that, and she comes so quick …”
“Yo … you told her?”
“What could I do?”
And the house door bangs open in the hall, the front door and Gabriel’s mother is there, tall black-haired Yolanda who blessings be always knows what to do is striding into the house where their family of five has lived for fifteen years, and also Gabriel’s older sister Miriam and younger brother Dennis and soon to be brother-in-law Leo; Leo closing the door very quietly while what’s left of their little family swarms him, the missing father found at last: calling him, groaning, crying aloud together.
Slivered onions spat in the pan and he sliced in cooked potatoes to calm them. He got two eggs from the fridge. They spread out white and yellow quick, he stirred and shifted and flipped, then went back for a third egg, white as snow, wash me and I shall be whiter—cooking heat such a gentle sound, a soft reassurance. He sprinkled in chopped beer sausage, then shredded cheddar and slowly his random gestures melted into the fragrance of Kaeseueberbacken, cheese-baked-over, as they called it in the Marburg University student Mensa, though this was really ueberbraten—fried-over, his comfort food, his desperately seeking comfort. He could check his e-mail for whatever would never be there, he could surely call Miriam in Vancouver or Dennis in Toronto and talk face to face, this was exactly why Dennis had insisted on setting up his Skype—but he had no words he could bear now, leave alone face faces, even electronic. This ruthless memory, he had buried it forever, he vowed so often, buried finally with his only Yolanda, enough, enough already! they had agreed together again and over again and then out of nowhere their beautiful son was between them again. Every relentless bit and scratch and word of him they could only rub against each other, concentrating and remembering and reminding, scraps and tag-ends streaming together while they scraped themselves even rawer, shred by shred they again talked their son into previously noticed and unnoticed existences; as if they would build a gigantic wall along the cliffs and ridges, over the tips of the highest most savagely broken mountains or the deepest river gorges and horizonless prairies of their past until they had again piled up every tiny grain of possible fact into an impregnable wall against every possible … and then her life stopped. She was gone too.
Blessed are you, Yolanda. Now you know.
Together over fifty years and gone. Gabriel only twenty-four and a half—though that was certainly enough, more than enough to need to remember. As Hal had watched Yo’s final smoke vanish in blue sky he had vowed, on the memory of Gabriel’s smoke and ashes, to wring every remembrance of Gabriel down tight into absolute refusal: NO MORE. Gabe would now be the black hole in his universe of memory. Not even sleep would betray him into one shard of dream, enough now, that past was completed and forever somewhere beyond this life and now Yo eternally knew all of it; he need only wait until he too was smoke and ashes and he too would know, he would not continue here like a stunned idiot pursued by these hounds of recall. Leave it. Think nothing.
And then today. Before he could defend himself memory walked past the Double Cup window. He had stared at it—stupidly. And he recognized he had been waiting to see that, sitting there over the months so deliberately blank and empty but actually waiting … now he stared down at the dark circle of cheese in the frying pan. There was a smell of something singed. Safe, the coffee shop had always seemed meaninglessly nothing, safe … but like a stupid shit—the screaming woman in the pickup named him all right—he jumped up and ran out after it. Why in God’s name. How could he not.
“I changed my flight to—”
“You weren’t on the plane, we were praying and paging and watching every exit and the Montreal plane landed and nothing, twenty minutes! not even your bag and then the RCMP came and said now he could tell me, your name wasn’t on the Montreal passenger list, you—”
“No, it wasn’t, I changed my flight.”
“You never told me, Friday! We were phoning all over—”
“I came from Winnipeg, but Gabriel, tell me—”
“Winnipeg? What? We found Gabriel yesterday and you—”
“Tell me!” he bellows.
Their desperate hugs loosen, their sobbing sags. Young Dennis ducks aside completely and Leo’s aristocratic Argentinian face hardens into resolution—these words need distance—but Miriam pulls Hal harder into her tears as Yolanda stiffens in his arms.
“We ran,” Yo says, “the path to the shed and past, when we looked we saw the blue cab easily through the leaves, we just hadn’t looked there driving up, all the slippery snow and Denny and Miriam ran faster, they got there first and Denny stopped by the hood and didn’t go any farther but Miriam shoved through the little trees and she screamed and yanked the canopy gate open, and I got there last and it was all open and I just crawled in beside him, he was lying on a mattress from the cabin with flowered sheets covering so smooth and his blue pillow and one blue blanket to his chin and his hands just lying by his side and his face … so peaceful, not … not … just quiet, like he would say when he didn’t mean it, no problem, no problem at all … his face stone … oh Gabriel, Gabriel. This is so final …”
He is clutching Yo tight, they are all again clamped together crying aloud so hard they are staggering, and a thought breaks in him and he shoves himself loose among these beloved shoulders, arms that are still here:
“Where is he?”
They stare at him.
“Where!”
Behind him Dave says, “The police came—”
“Police?”
“Big Ed called 911, the RCMP came, and the ambulance and when the police finished the ambulance took him—”
“Finished!”
“They have to, come, to make sure—”
“He’s in Leduc, in the hospital?”
Dave says very quietly, “No. The funeral people have him now.”
“I have to see him! Before they smear all that makeup and—”
“Hal,” Dave pulls at him, “they just got him today, noon, from the Medical Examiner.”
“Medical Exam—”
“Any unexpected dea—”
“Yes, yes,” Yo interrupts, “let’s go to the undertakers, now, Dave, you drive us, c’mon.”
And they are all at the house door. Strangely, there is now a crowd of people on the front lawn, and driveway, and along the sidewalk. Do all these people know? When did they come? Standing silently, looking, drawing back and some women reach out towards them, sobbing aloud, but Dave walks ahead, pushes past them gesturing, talking. The faces part and Hal recognizes th
em; more women and men are coming along the sidewalk, up the walk, but they step aside onto the grass, he recognizes friends from church, yes, from university and concert and theatre acquaintances, some neighbours he waves hi to when he sees them getting into their car, of course it is Sunday afternoon so everyone’s called around and knows except he, he wasn’t anywhere in Montreal or anywhere findable in Canada at any phone number they knew nor even on his scheduled plane from Montreal … they are driving. The usual street corners and merging lanes with cars and North Saskatchewan River valley and horses inside the rail fence and hills and stops and the bend around University Avenue onto Whyte and outside the car everything looks perfectly fall city normal, the trees over traces of snow are unchangeable evergreen or turning gold along the boulevard and the stop light … but Hal is not driving. It is not their car. Dave sits alone in front and Yo and Miriam clutch him tight in the back seat—
“Where’s Dennis!”
Yo hugs him tighter, her cheek pressing his. It seems Denny is with Leo in their car following them. Miriam, he feels her tears on his hand, she is holding it against her face, it appears she has been talking, she is—
“… the bathroom counter in the cabin, I saw a contact lens case right there by the sink, but Big Ed doesn’t need glasses, what? Gabe’s case? Whose else could it be? And I opened it and unscrewed the L and the R and there were lenses, floating in the fluid, they must be his, the case looked like his, we were so worried he didn’t answer his apartment phone and he had the pickup—was he here—he drove to the creek alone so often for a day or two, why shouldn’t he—there’s no pickup outside but here’s his contacts? Had he … how could he forget his—and I had this terrifying rush and I ran out the bathroom and Mom was coming towards me …”
Hal gets his right arm free of Yolanda and wraps it around Miriam as well, hard, her slender shuddering body, just hold that—his mind blank as an explosion—hold. After some stops and starts the car turns and through her hair he recognizes the great ash tree at the boulevard crosswalk on 104th Street. A few days ago, ten at most, he walked under it between Gabriel and Dennis walking so slim and tall on either side, laughing all together at the frothy Edmonton Festival play they had seen and Gabriel joking as they passed through the crowds crossing under the tree, “They play with the bigness of their littleness.” Hal recognized the Kafka line and called him on it and they laughed again though Dennis didn’t get the literary reference but did get the joke. They were all swinging along and he felt so good about Gabe’s wit, it was amazing to walk so easily between his two tall, beautiful sons after a fun play, both already taller than he and laughing—and the corner sign twists above them as the car turns again: Strathcona Funeral Home.
Home. His body convulses. Long parking lanes and three doors, square brick pillars and three heavy and heavier doors sigh and there is Gabriel.
Not gone at all. On his back. In an ice-cold room. On a steel table. He is not gone, here he is, his feet bare, his blue-faded jeans and half a pale sheet and his favourite green woven-linen shirt, his slender hands laid over each other, his narrow face. His hair not quite so curly nor flying long around his shoulders as it did when he clanged that dazzling electric bass guitar, no, mussed and short, a lovely trim. His neat moustache, nostrils, full lips … somewhat shrunk, crushed against his beautiful teeth, but his skin clear, absolutely perfect after that endless year of swallowing pills and having to smear his face and neck down to his shoulders every night. Once, when Hal went into the basement, at that moment Gabe opened his bathroom door, Here, you want to see what it’s like? His long face coated like glistening shellac, finger-painted dead white, forehead and cheeks and neck and circling his eyes and mouth and nostrils, Every night a clown, see? Skin so perfect now and clear, nothing smeared, no clown left … but cold. His fingers, his cheek, his lips. He can dare to feel, hold every bit of him. Such a big man, so horribly hard. His gaunt ice feet.
“Cremation,” he says aloud.
There have been various voices, for some time, talking very low, talking possible clothes and the church service for the funeral and Herbert the minister is there … his shoulders have certainly already been clasped hard and words, God give you … O … strength … comfort … what is there to say if not God … both extended families have already been phoned and they are all coming tomorrow. Margret and Ernst and ancient David from Vancouver and Saskatoon and Medicine Hat and the newspaper obit tomorrow, okay, Yo’s sister Elaine won’t come because of her heart but her husband will and her brother Joe, yes the funeral service could be late Tuesday afternoon at the church and the choice of coffin, a full range is available, all on view right here in our display room and the program and pallbearers and the organ music by William of course and the choir will sing and which cemetery, a plot can certainly be purchased in the Two Hills … any number of people glance at him and then quickly away; several he has never seen before.
In another room. Gabriel is not in it. Not lying flat on a stainless steel table and his eyes now shut. Only three polished desks with not a wisp of paper on them, one small computer not switched on. So he tells them exactly:
“He told me in August. We were wrapping poplars along the creek because of the beaver and he told me: ‘I know nobody’s ever done this in our family but if I’m ever dead, cremate me.’ ”
Their family is all together, alone, walking away through the funeral home lobby, when he breaks. He would have crumpled if Dennis had not been holding his arm, and Miriam quickly as well. He can only stagger, gesture. And they turn back, lurch back into the frozen steel room.
The glass of milk in his hand, Hal noticed, was half empty. The cheese-fried-over lingered in his mouth, it seemed to have tasted as good as always, golden and quietly salty. But nausea was nudging, bumping inside him again and he could not swallow anymore; let the pan cool for the fridge, there’s always tomorrow. April evening sun blazed through the kitchen window, off the melting snow on the garage roof. There would be light till nine.
The Orange Downfill had ripped open what he locked down so carefully every day, every minute—Leo would call it a barranca. That was it, exactly, a violent chasm torn through the eroded mountains of his life. It had to be filled in again, fast, rammed solid with whatever concretion he could find to keep himself blank: fake TV virtuality, books, drugged sleep, Globe and Mail and Journal and Herald Sudoku and the world’s endless, violent, banal facticity, movies, books, pretend to write stories page after page on the futile precision of computer screens that he never even printed on his ancient Lexmark and certainly no one would ever read Deo juvante, books, dig gulps of snow into barely unfrozen flowerbeds, listen again to Schubert’s String Quintet in C major, the adagio’s lifting delight plucking away any possible thought, books by the thousand piled everywhere in the house and the public library just down the street …
Too vicious, too deep, that collar turn of orange barranca. The colour, the indelible walk, that fling of profile and shoulder disappearing.
He knew of course the only way he could fill it. Where he would find the hardest earthly stuff, more than enough, it was always there and had been for years, waiting, he needed to remember nothing to find it; if he dared. That secret day and a half in Winnipeg when he could not be found—when their son was dead—had twisted itself in and out of their larger pain; but his intentions for that disappearing, barely a second in any normal lifetime, had been so good! A marvellous surprise for the whole family, especially for Gabe whom he would phone the minute he got back home—the minute he walked in—to meet him immediately and tell him, tell him first, the others would wait, happily, if he told them it would make Gabe happy to know first—of the Winnipeg Film Board producer who had found Hal’s short story “George Stewart” in a Manitoba school reader, about the ragged old bachelor on his boreal homestead who, simply because of his name, knew he was actually the true and rightful living King of England and the only way to get the world out of this stupid war with Hitler, real
quick and easy, was just talk straight with him man to man, lay it on the line, praise the Lord and pass the conversation and we’ll all be free! A short-short movie about the bushed old man and the boy who believes him and the producer would get Gabe on the film crew. Two weeks or three of Best Boy again and he would get more experience and make other connections, find more film jobs and get him working with something he loved already and could learn more and get him away from Edmonton and all the endless usual …
Hal was in his basement. Two, three stacked boxes in the shelves along one basement wall. HP 170, The University of Alberta Central Stores, 8 1/2 × 11–10 M, Paper for Use in Copy Machines. Labelled by Yolanda’s thick black felt pen: GABRIEL.
She finally said, It has to be done. And she did it.
All he had done was heave them into place, here.
