Come Back

by Rudy Wiebe

  Picture 6. The bedroom, full mirror: “star” pictures pinned over each other on poster above bed; mirror outlined with portraits, the left side all Ailsa school photos from kindergarten to grade 8. But also: above the portraits along the bottom edge of the mirror a faint shadow of Gabriel’s head. Very small and in profile, looking right.

  Picture 7. The bedroom, full mirror: the blurred double-image of the back of a man from the waist up, naked, pointing the pistol of his left (right) hand into his ear.

  Not a word written about the pictures. Nowhere.

  The ‘85 diary from June 25 to August 3 named only movies and minimal acts; but then, suddenly, two intense personal statements.

  DAILY PLANNER 1985: July Monday 1

  I owe Ross a beer tennis with Denn

  July Wednesday 10

  Fender-bender with parents’ pickup—changing lanes, my fault

  July Thursday 11

  V. Nabokov, “To Russia: Will you leave me alone? I implore you!”

  July Wednesday 16

  Reading Robert Kroetsch, What the Crow Said

  People, years later, blamed everything on the bees

  July Tuesday 23

  Tennis with Denn

  July Friday 26

  Four days cabin work 9 hrs 6 hrs 10 hrs 6 hrs

  July Wednesday 31

  Unemployment Insurance application accepted.

  Miriam returns from Quito with Leo I cry for what’s to come

  Thursday August 1

  Trampoline with Denn. Out with Ross, Judy, Beth

  August Saturday 3 across Sunday 4 and Monday 5

  Writers weekend, about ten talking with Dad at Aspen Creek, they read their (often pretentious) work. Isabelle o you are such a flake. Sure you have brilliant eyes, but real intelligence? To argue that females should get male roles is ridiculous! Why on earth or heaven would anyone want a male role, always lonely, shy, timid, yet always expected to be endlessly competent, to forever compete! We’re so loaded down with old shit, females should want to invent totally new roles for themselves.

  Image, the evening campfire (Isabelle sat there, she saw it too): A moth flying out of the darkness, beautiful swoops, flutter, dive, a faint hiss, a wobble, it falls to the ground beside me. The end.

  Memory Image: when I returned from Europe, first time back in her house, A came up from the basement dressed like a clown, face and all, October 27 1984. She was playing the buffoon, the comic inversion for what is all-powerful and controlling—she wouldn’t know it, but I know now, for sure.

  So okay God, you create a world, a world we have to exist in. Why?

  I never asked to be me I can refuse

  August Monday 12 over Tuesday 13

  If I do have love, complete love, I should be able to live forever, no matter what the outcome. If all I have to offer is death, obviously meaning, literally, the ceasing of this love, then it can be construed as not being a completely obsessive love. But non-existence can also be seen as an easy cop-out, a pathetic choice of evasion: even if the world is full of useless, trite things, including myself, I should fight against exactly that. However, to end now will be to undo the triteness A is, that I am. And I’ll be forgotten within months by the few who still remember, I’ll be missed by less in even less time.

  It’s not that I don’t want to live, it’s that somehow I’ve lost a means by which to function. I’m as hollow as a pail filled with only one thing. Has there ever been a more nervous and shy … if only I were a beautiful female some Big Strong Manly MAN would save me. Laugh. What can I say if you don’t know and understand already—when you’re empty, what is there to miss? I’m sorry, I don’t mean to hurt anyone—I did not ask to come, with my personality, into a place in time and space to hurt anyone. Okay, refusal to be is an act against the God in us. I refuse to make choices, oh, obviously death is a choice—an extremely clumsy and awkward one at that. Can you imagine the discovery, poor person

  Yah sure Gabe, your empty life is a continuous ravenous process, always a wanting more, always a somehow feed yourself hnnnn feed feed

  Feed yourself. Hal remembered a morning in January, when Owl was leafing through Double Cup newspapers as Hal watched a pigeon on the sidewalk outside. It was bird busy, eating. Fluffed fat in the cold, it ran and fluttered between passing feet while pecking at what seemed to be the brown crumbs of a cookie. The crumbs were scattered everywhere, crushed into the cracks between sidewalk bricks, but the pigeon was finding them, pecking them out quick as fingers tapping when Owl spoke suddenly: “Feeding them is the least of it.”

  Hal glanced up at him. “What?”

  “This news again, East Africa.”

  “Oh, yeah. Starvation.”

  “Getting worse, every week …”

  Hal said, “I can’t remember that, ever starving.”

  “For what?”

  “For …?”

  Owl was staring out the window. Momentarily no one walked there in the brilliant cold; only the pigeon huddled into a fluffy ball now, and on the street motionless cars in shrouds of winter exhaust.

  Hal said, “Starving, for food.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I meant,” Owl said. “And I’ve needed food, not now, never in Edmonton, really, but where I was a kid.”

  “Actually, my parents starved too,” Hal said. “Plenty, in Russia with the Communists, ‘Hungaschnoot’ they called it, hunger-need, agony. But I was born in Canada.”

  “Me too,” Owl said. “But north, way too far north. In winter on the Deh-Cho Mackenzie River you need more. For a few days it’s not much, not so bad, a ache you feel up there lots of times, but sometimes it gets real bad and you all know Hunger Animal has come. Hunger Animal is different from ‘being hungry,’ we have a different word for her in our language, nobody ever says that name out loud, but we all know it, in English it would be sort of like ‘Hunger Animal.’ She’s like a black beaver, huge mouth full of teeth curved for gnawing, she starts small and eats herself bigger in your gut, you feel her chewing out your gut, the hole gets bigger and bigger and pretty soon it’s so big she’s gnawing in your chest, your throat, Hunger Animal’s in your mouth and eye, everything you see is something you have to eat. There’s never enough then, you see a bit of caribou fur, a piece of dog shit, whatever you find you take and put it in your mouth, it doesn’t fill the hole inside you but you chew it, you swallow, you see fire and a pot of water and your sister’s toes are a row of little sausages, they’re soup …”

  Hal stared at his craggy friend. Owl, cold coffee forgotten, continued in what had now soaked into monotone:

  “It’s way past having to eat, wanting food. Or being together … together is just something watching you eat. Nobody else is there anymore when Hunger Animal eats you empty, just you alone with her, there’s nothing left, just her. Eating.”

  Beyond the glass wall, the pigeon was gone; only people, cars crept by, so slowly in the groaning, rutted snow it seemed they were hunched forward in weeping.

  Finally Hal murmured, “You said, ‘For what?’ ”

  “Oh yeah … food. Just having no food is pretty easy, even one rabbit or ptarmigan can start chasing her away, then, but she can come different too, you sometimes don’t know what she is but you know she’s there and she wants something. It’s not food—stick it in your mouth and chew and swallow—no, if Hunger Animal finds you she always wants some big thing you haven’t got … or can’t have—she’s inside you, gnawing deeper. When you can’t think or feel nothing else, that’s her.”

  Abruptly it seemed to Hal that Owl no longer spoke English; he was somehow talking a Dene translation so thin it was diaphanous as vapour. And more so when he continued:

  “When I was a boy, our medicine man who had four songs, while he was chopping down trees for that highway the Americans made to Alaska during the war, he told me he had once seen Hunger Animal. Huge, black, coming through the trees, you could tell it was her by the light following her. Big like a spruce all on fi
re, but coming and no other trees burning. He warned me, I was just young, he said if you ever see that, just run like hell.”

  The warm surround of the coffee shop held them motionless in their soft chairs. After a time Hal lifted his Monday cup; took a swallow of cold coffee.

  “Did you ever see that, in the trees?”

  “No.”

  “You believe what he said?”

  “It’s not just food,” Owl said. “When she’s in you, he said, she wants what you haven’t got. And you have to have it to stay alive, you need it more and more because there’s only less and less of you to want it.”

  Music was playing from the ceiling, a familiar Beatles song but Hal could not think about that. He was concentrating on Owl, and asked him again,

  “Do you believe what he said?”

  “No,” Owl said. “No. But one bad winter, in the snow I saw the tracks.”

  “Tracks?”

  “Yeah. And you run like hell, but you can’t forget.”

  DAILY PLANNER 1985: August Wednesday 14

  Hi.

  Loving son: we will never know how much you thought, and wrote, and then destroyed. But you deliberately left us these spare diaries: they were to be, they are your message to us after you are gone. And on an otherwise empty day during your last August you offer us greeting:

  Hi.

  And suddenly Hal could not endure what was approaching through the shredded trees of his life; what had come, what was forever already there since that tiny word was written. Like the final exhalation of a breath.

  Oh Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have pity on me a sinner. Up the basement stairs thump by thump and across to the back door, unlock, walk out on the deck. Face the last April sun blazing down through snow-spotted trees tipped with green buds.

  The houses and condo blocks of the city loomed there as ever, piled blankly dark around him. A helicopter—the city police?—beat somewhere, fading east. Why didn’t they come and get his official guilt registered, take him and throw away the key, oh sure it was that old guy, he’s in here every day, name’s Hal, he comes and goes on 104th Street towards Saskatchewan Drive, he’s sometimes with that Dene guy, Owl, yeah, usually straggle beard, he run out yelling a name like crazy—why didn’t he go, what was the matter with him, why—

  He heard a sound he has known since before memory: he stared at the sky, high and west, where the last blue light played in burning clouds and he saw the bent line of Canada geese, he heard their honking even more distantly clear when he found their ragged, undulating V, their giant wings stretching their long necks, their bodies yearning relentlessly north. His heart leaped as he watched, their sound, one arm of their V shifting steadily forward, shaping them into an N and then gradually out of it as they cried into a wobbly W and then bent slowly out into a larger variation of V; they were calling north high over the bright city and the dark river valley and the luminous sprawl of streets beyond, and it seemed to him they were writing their shape-shifting story letter by letter on the sky, he read it bright as memory:

  Thom, his Groota Brooda/Big Brother Thomas, Thom, forever nineteen. And he was little Hal, almost nine then, he was looking up at Thom so huge beside him in the wagon box bumping towards the Wapiti Post Office and Thom’s big right hand lifted from the reins, pointed up. It was not spring, it was autumn and the V of the great geese were crying south. That last autumn before the winter Thom enlisted in the Canadian Armed Forces though no one drafted him. Two years earlier he had declared himself before an official government Registrar as a Mennonite Conscientious Objector and had been judged and lectured and granted exemption as an essential farm worker—with Mam he ran their Wapiti farm far better than their father was capable of—but the day after Christmas 1944 he travelled eighty-two miles to North Battleford, Saskatchewan, and enlisted in the Air Force and on Sunday January 28, 1945 he was dead. The telegram said he had been running a Basic Training obstacle course in Ontario when he lost his grip on a high bar, and fell. His neck broke.

  Sixteen years to the day before Gabriel Thomas was born.

  Their Wapiti Mennonite Church deacon Peter Block holds the telegram low in his left hand. Backed against their closed kitchen door in his black buffalo fur coat, but they are all staring at the dirt-yellow English paper he has translated. “A horrible accident,” he says in Low German. And again quietly: “Accident.”

  On his Edmonton house deck, the distant Canada geese gone in the darkening spring sky, for Hal that word was like a bell tolling: “Onn-jletj … Onn-jletj.” And he thought again, “Jletj” means “luck,” the word literally meant “un-luck,” and his father’s Low German words ignoring completely their mother’s piercing shriek, words so fierce little Hal had never heard his mostly silent father speak to anyone like that, leave alone to the all-powerful deacon who spoke English as well as any school teacher:

  “You always say there is NO UN-LUCK! There is only GOD’S WILL!”

  And the Deacon gestured helplessly with one empty hand at their wailing mother and sister Margret, and then at Hal as well: who had read and understood the telegram words perfectly without translation, he had been at enough Wapiti funerals to know about dead.

  Accident. Un-luck. Noun or verb—at best, stunning evasions.

  Whatever it was, you could do nothing. These were the facts, you had to accept. Accept your big brother Thomas would walk those winter miles alone to the highway and flag down the Meadow Lake–North Battleford bus and after five weeks come grinding home through snow in a box on the back of a truck and in the corner churchyard beyond the barn four Royal Canadian Air Force soldiers would surround that box like posts and hoist their bayonet rifles up at the sky, Yes! you thought then, stab him, shoot him, God!

  And when your oldest son so carefully backs up your truck, parks among small birches.

  Facts.

  The geese over the city were gone, and the sun. A last brightness flamed against clouds above the patches of roofs, beyond the six high-rises clear through a spray of bare trees: how long since he had remembered his beloved brother’s rigid face in that coffin, that dreadful uniform … he will not remember. No. Owl and tomorrow would come as certainly as the moon rising and now the sun was gone and it was time, yes, time for the detailed and programmed evening rituals that led him steadfastly through his life wilderness of utter avoidance into the blessed, daily blank nirvana of unconsciousness. Go, not down into the basement, go upstairs, go up. Abandon this.

  Gabe’s word: abandonment. No, impossible now. Down again.

  DAILY PLANNER 1985: August Tuesday 20 and across Wednesday 21

  Yes—I’m sorry—I’m sorry—I’m incredibly sorry

  Listen to pop music on the radio trying to hear a certain song. Go to Music Centre to look, their PA is playing like vibrating thunder “… and she knew that she would never drive through Paris in a …” I slam the door on it.

  Where is there a saviour when you need one. It’s too much a romantic dream.

  The effort needed to write down words thought in the mind is never good enough—words put down, even sung, are never, ever—o banal—somehow this Gabriel Thomas Wiens does not have the stuff to write down … too full, too empty

  Arrange something beautiful, an image … I don’t know if I can do this, even for my darling Mir, this white and red rose picture wedding present, rolls of shots, they develop so trite. Vases all around, vases bought or hand-shaped—and I don’t know what exists inside a female—hence they are all empty, not even two transitory flowers—the colours alone don’t do it.

  In evening meet Shirley, Susan, Donna, Mary, Simone and friend / feel like expired high school—feel like a twit

  I need to start everything all over again; life is good, lovely—but how can I do this living? Oh skip it

  August Monday 26 and scrawled across two full pages to Saturday 31

  Gabe: you must remember that the ramifications of this act before the 21st of September (M&L wed.) are going to put gr
eat distress on that whole happy situation. If you were a strong man you would wait at least till after. But Mir getting

  (Saw A and skinny Joanne through the girders walking across High Level Bridge on opposite side as I walked to play tennis with Denn. A on railing side, her hair permed in gold streaks since I last saw her. When? Did she see me? I’ll never know)

  Quit reading this, trying to find clues to who I am. Shut the case and go on with your lives. Cause here I sit and I know that I would preferably do no different—I’m no better than you. (I know / I do seek romantic crap) (NFT Board meeting 6:30 Citadel)

  It’s going to be so messy. How long will it take a week imagine the poor person

  Sorry Mir, I have no gift to give you—I have none for anybody. Even God—he just I would rather burn in hell than go to a “Father” who just creates and then leaves you on your own / I don’t want to go on living this given life: I refuse to accept being my self any longer. Therefore, I guess, proving I have faith in, I value my self.

  Oh well, I can certainly babble contradictions

  (The Trial—lovely music)

  These photos I took to make Mir a present. I should have put the camera right up to the white and red roses in Clara’s stacked-clay vase, with a wide open aperture, that way the background would be blurry and foreground in beautiful focus. But I kept the camera back about 3 feet: crap, should do it over again // but I don’t have the money, and to make the effort, and time … Not drunk yet—suck some more. That’s better—the first waves of warmth pervade my being—and at the same moment I feel that I shall continue. hunnnnn needs to be seen All this stuff written Aug. 25/85

  The long walk, bridge, university, valley, dining at home, Mom always so good to me I sometimes can’t stand it, yell, yell and walk out. Feel worse with every step