by Bill Gaston
The Philippines was a Christian country, and Andy wondered what those guys down there felt about being at sea at Christmas. Probably similar to the boys here called in from layoff exactly three days before Christmas to handle fresh traffic, pissed off to work the holidays but happy for some time-and-a-half, and double time on the day itself. Rum ’n’ eggnog money, right on cue. Buy Junior the latest twitch system, be a hero after all.
Andy turned to go in and read when a small plant caught his eye, growing in a wedge of grain dust gathered near the silo edge. He wondered if it could be mint. It looked like it, the classic leaf shape, with those wrinkles. He didn’t like going that close to the edge, so he’d leave it be, but it would be nice just to step outside one’s shack and pick something wild, wouldn’t it? Did mint go with moose? He should go online to search out more spices the French had. He should be phoning Leonard. Mussels. Moose.
Andy closed the door to his shed. He swept Dean’s lunch crumbs (he could smell tuna) off the metal table, feeling as he did so its odd surface, layers of thick paint over carved graffiti. Boredom’s strata. But it really wasn’t a bad place. He could tell her stories about some characters here, yes he could. Though some of the more high-octane stuff was troubling. Laura would have heard about Pauline’s father, who fell maybe fifteen years ago now. Andy was up in his annex shack when Joe was reported missing, and he took part in the search, poking into the few nooks and crannies up on the bin tops, and peering over the edge in the spots that had safety rails. Pauline’s dad was a supervisor and could be anywhere on site. Ten minutes in, Andy saw the arc lamp they’d brought to illuminate something, and then he could see Joe, lying way off, tiny and spread-eagled, two hundred feet down under Silo B. No one had a clue how Joe Mulders could make this mistake. He drank a bit but was a regular sort. There was no possible connection, but maybe the weirdest thing was that Pauline’s father died a year and a day after Drew’s mother had gone into the river.
Andy only heard about another one, a big prank gone wrong. Sam Cuthbert decided not to quit but get himself fired because it was easier to get pogey that way. But in the old days it was actually hard to get fired. If caught drinking or smoking dope you got suspended, which people called the unpaid vacation. Cuthbert conspired to get fired in a blaze of glory, timing everything for the toughest super, Jackson. Cuthbert had wild hair and beard and a huge flabby torso, and his better friends called him “Hogbody.” Hogbody’s idea: a conveyor belt cornered near the door to the general office, and if you roller-bladed against the flow, with the help of a friend’s signal, Jackson would emerge to encounter a naked Hogbody skating at him hard. There was some question as to whether he’d jump on Jackson then or what. Cuthbert practised blading the belt a couple of times, and he did attempt the prank, except he was drunk on this his last day and fell after only a few strides, flew away on the belt, flipped at the bend, and got caught in the rollers. All Jackson saw was a naked man stuck in the belt fifty yards down, screaming for real though barely heard above the noise. Sam Cuthbert lost a leg mid-shin, and the pinkie and ring fingers of one hand, and it became a difficult anecdote to entertain someone with, because you could be sure Cuthbert himself has never laughed at any of it.
Then there was Andy’s own first day bin-digging, the rite of passage to which they used to subject every new employee. It was horrifying, Laura! You’re nervous enough, guys joke about death by methane as they strap you into a leather diaper-thing and clip it to a thin cable, and now they’re sticking a weird hard hat on you, a tin one with a miner’s light on it, the only light you’ll have down there. Then the ratty old gas mask, which looks First World War and snaps to the hard hat with rotten leather straps; so they weren’t kidding about poisonous gas. They hand you a shovel! The job is to loosen up crusted grain at the bottom of the bin, hardened from the tons of pressure. (Sort of like coal? Andy joked, nervous. Sort of like diamond, some wag hissed back.) They tell you that, at the bottom, some choose to step out of their harness because it’s hard digging while attached to the cable, but then there’s the danger of drowning in loose grain, which is worse than quicksand, someone adds. And because it contradicts the crusted coal image so much, you realize they’re just trying to get you nervous with the worst stuff they can think of. Still, he was lowered two hundred feet, through poisonous air, in the dark, on a WWI cable. Laura — it was horrifying! But you wished new guys were still made to do it, all the same.
THAT NIGHT AT TEN, an hour left in their shift, Drew called from downstairs.
“So, yeah. We’re splitting up. After New Year’s I’m moving out.”
“You’re kidding. Where?”
“Those blue apartments on 6th, past the hospital? Third floor. Decent view.”
“Holy cow.”
Drew had chosen a phone call, at work, to have their heart-to-heart.
“We’re thinking the weirdest part’ll be that we’re both still in town. I mean, we’ll bump into each other. We’ll hear that so-and-so was with so-and-so last night.”
“Holy cow.” Andy thought for a moment. “Hey, is that what happened? Does one of you already have a so-and-so?”
“No.” Now Drew paused to consider. “I can’t even imagine a new so-and-so. I don’t even know what you do to get a so-and-so.”
Drew’s romantic history: two decades with the same person. Andy doubted either had ever cheated. So Drew had never dated as an adult, never been a free agent, on the hunt. But surely he wasn’t now seeking advice from his best friend, whose own dating tactics apparently involved sitting around waiting almost two decades for his girlfriend to come back.
“You still splitting up even with Chris back here?”
“What’s Chris got to do with it?” Drew asked, calmly. This was raw, skinless territory, and Andy could sense Drew trying to come up with something funny. “I’m paying him back. I’m running away from home. Show him what it feels like.” Drew paused, and his tone shifted. “He won’t even know I’m not there.”
Andy shook his head at his friend’s complicated pain. He remembered Pauline telling him how Drew thought he was depressed. Maybe when Drew saw him he saw complicated pain. But now wasn’t the time for that talk. Likely there wouldn’t be a time. Droning comfortably into the phone, loud enough to be heard over their respective nearby machines, they talked about little things, Christmas things. Pauline wanted Drew to help her cajole Chris into going to midnight Mass, “just once, for the experience,” but Drew wasn’t playing along, because there was “just no good reason to go, even to gawk.” Then Drew remembered something he wanted to ask Andy, and it was whether he still had that Chinese woman’s —“not the pretty one’s”— phone number.
“Who, May? May E?”
“Yeah. Not the pretty one.”
Andy explained that he’d given her his number, not the other way around, and asked Drew what was up.
“I guess something weird happened,” Drew began, and then went on to tell Andy what his father had told him, which was that it seems “the other one, the pretty one —”
“Li.”
“— had left town last week, flew back to China presumably, but called the PR police station from the airport to make a confusing complaint that sounded like sexual assault, but maybe not, and she mentioned one name —‘Danny Boy’—and described two men, and one sounded like Art Tanner.”
“Did she say what they did?”
“Maybe they didn’t do anything, maybe she was just pissed off in general and wanted to tell somebody that three assholes treated her like shit. I don’t remember, but my dad says they both went home together. He said all proud, ‘I put those two ladies in a big black taxi.’”
It sounded like Drew had slurped some eggnog in the lunchroom.
“The police pressing charges?”
“It’s nothing like that. They told her to come in but she just caught her plane. The cops called my dad because I guess she mentioned his party. And now he wants to check with . . . ?”
“He thought you had her number. Actually he hoped you’d be the one to call her.”
“Would somebody fly back to China just because some guys were rude to her?”
“Who knows. Maybe she was homesick. Maybe it was the last straw.”
“Maybe.”
Andy remembered May telling him that the college had arranged office space for them. Rachel Hedley could help him find May’s number. He told Drew to tell his dad that he’d call her to see how she was. He liked May. They had communicated, leapt over the language barrier. She might be feeling pretty lonely right now.
Drew told him a super just eyed him a second time and he had to get back at it. So they signed off, not just “later” but with some “well, okay’s” too, slowly and with significant depth, letting each other know that they’d talked about some important things, that they’d just done what good friends did. Drew was definitely moving out, and he confirmed it now by asking Andy to help him take some furniture to the new place. Andy wanted to joke about women being like work, and now that Drew’s shift was apparently over with Pauline, Andy was going to punch the clock with Laura, but in his head he couldn’t get it to sound at all funny, plus Drew would find it pathetic in spades.
CHRISTMAS MORNING, the house smelled richly of coffee and frying bacon. As always, the day began with gifts. They were down to one apiece. After Andy and his mother started their two-person Christmas, it had taken them a few years to hold to the promise of one gift and one gift only, it being hard for her not to add “little last-minute things,” often sweaters or, one time, a box holding eighteen pairs of red work socks.
Today she had just the one. Wrapped in metallic crimson paper, the box she cradled in her lap looked the size to contain a baseball. Or an orange — Andy had a favourite story from a childhood book about an impoverished rural Christmas where a boy received the sole gift of an orange and was surprised and overjoyed almost to a faint. It was a kind of emotional pornography (it was the only gift in the house, and the lone parent, his father, was dying), but the kid had never tasted an orange before, and it was a miracle not only of love but of food.
“I bet you it’s gone by tonight,” his mother said, pointing out the picture window at the backyard where last night’s foot of pillowy snow was already half eaten into by rain. They agreed they’d had a white Christmas, which was the main thing.
Two cups of black coffee steamed on the glass coffee table. Andy’s gift to her, in a shoebox wrapped in the Sunday comics, rested beside his coffee, on which floated a film of cinnamon. He sat on the couch and his mother on the matching chair, facing each other on a diagonal, both in their pyjamas and bathrobes. The ritual, unbroken since she had moved out with her three friends, was that she arrived with a suitcase on Christmas Eve, they decorated the tree, and she spent that night in the old house with Andy, waking up to Christmas morning together in this house as they always had. She slept in the old master bedroom in her old bed, the same one his father had died in while lying asleep beside her so long ago now, and Andy wondered what lively ghosts Christmas Eve must conjure for her every year.
Sometimes she volunteered a ghost or two. How well, for instance, she could remember his hair, or smell, or “his face when he was your age, Andy.” Sometimes such things came in intense sudden glimpses, then were gone. She sat, sighing wistfully, confirming things such as, “He was a good man, your father,” and “We did have some fun,” and “It is such a marvellous view of the water.” It became clear to Andy that this one day of the year, lasting from the evening she arrived until the next evening when she left after turkey dinner, was the time she allowed herself unabashed nostalgia of the broadest kind. It was a time they were expected to talk about his father, their house, and their lives while they’d lived here.
Some years back, after their two-person Christmas had grown stale — his mother called it “a bit precious,” while he was thinking claustrophobic — they tried expanding it. They invited Leonard, but his was a large and religious family that gathered in the north village where their home church was. Another year they tried to entice Pauline and Drew, but they were with family too, and so were his mother’s housemates — Marie Schultz, for instance, always flew south to be with Laura and her husband and their child. So they stopped inviting and settled back on just the two of them, and one ghost. Sometimes, watching her descend the stairs in her robe, like a sleepy child, he thought it all a little perverse. And it sparked the question, why didn’t she still live here to begin with? Why doesn’t family live with family? But it was a topic she’d never once raised, and the discreet air to her silence maybe had to do with the women she assumed, or hoped, he must be bringing home on a regular basis.
Andy did enjoy talking about his father. His father had built this house, or at least had a hand in the design. Sitting in it, feeling the placement of rooms and their relationship to one another, and looking out the various windows and their purposeful views, was like — so Andy imagined — sitting in his father’s brain and seeing through his eyes. One of the house’s features was that its living room and picture windows faced not the road, like all other houses did, but instead the backyard, and treetops and, beyond that, the ocean. Recently built houses had their main windows on the ocean too, but earlier ones didn’t. Andy’s father had more or less turned a house around backwards. So when you came off the road and parked in the drive beside the front yard, what you encountered was the back of the house: kitchen entrance, bedroom windows, et cetera. As his father had said, repeated now every Christmas morning by his mother, “Why would you want to sit on a sofa and face a road?” She also reminded Andy that some in the neighbourhood actually got angry with him for facing his house the opposite way to theirs.
Andy turned the frying bacon, lowered the heat, and brought in the coffee pot. He topped her up. Standing over her, bending, he could smell her. It wasn’t bad, it was his mother’s smell, but with a bit more oomph behind it. She looked old to him this morning. An old face really did show the night’s sleep. He supposed he’d been watching her get old in her new house, while in this house he was used to a younger version.
“Merry Christmas, Mom.” He slid his present at her across the table.
“You first.” She held her crimson box out to him.
Despite his being ready for it, this was the sort of thing, her little commands, her insistence on running the show, that got to him still. If he’d tried to unwrap her gift first, he was fairly certain she would’ve corrected that too.
In any case he was looking forward to her seeing his gift. He took pride in hunting good presents, not bathrobes or perfume or something she could just get for herself. It had to be something she wouldn’t have thought of, and something beyond practical. And it couldn’t be radical or whimsical, that risked being stowed in a closet or hung out of guilt on a dark hallway wall. This year he’d known right away, as soon as he saw it there in the Art Gallery Store. Rich black argillite, carved in contemporary Haida style, a squatting man clenched himself at the shins in a stressful ball, the carving pretty much spherical save for his head and face lifted in sudden surprise. Whether the news, the shock, was good or bad was anyone’s guess. Andy liked to think it meant that any shock was good because it got the guy out of his painful clench. It was well carved, and had the emotional clout of art rather than the safer tone of craft, and it cost only $250. He could imagine it set over the fireplace at her house, or perhaps she’d want it just for herself and make a place for it on her dresser.
He took the red box from her and held it to his ear for the obligatory joke of listening for the time bomb, then he smelled it for the rotten cheese, then shook it with quizzical eyebrows up, because maybe it was that lump of coal his father had threatened him with every year. When he heard its particular thunk, and felt a familiar heft, his stomach lifted in question, and stayed that way until he ripped off the wrapper, and opened it.
“Good God.” He lifted the sleek
carving to his face and stared at it.
“What’s wrong, dear? Is it ugly?”
He decided not to tell her. She could have her own surprise. He sat quietly shaking his head, and when she unwrapped his identical gift she made as if she might spit coffee, then laughed and laughed, almost meaning it. She fanned her face, trying to talk.
“Don’t be sad, dear, really. It isn’t easy finding something unique in this town.”
It irked him that she’d think he might have reason to feel sad, not her.
“And,” she said, “I do have to say it: great minds do think alike.”
He held both balled men steady, side by side, staring at them, trying to find something different in their faces. One’s nostrils looked possibly wider. The other’s eyebrows maybe up.
“I really thought there would only be one of them. I thought it was art.”
“Well, I think it’s funny. And I must say I never thought we had the same taste.”
He hated that the carving had become less interesting and cutting edge simply because his mother had chosen it too. He should feel a little ashamed of himself for this, but he didn’t.
“Andrew — if you squint — it’s your lump of coal!”
They survived the gifts, and Andy actually took some comfort in knowing they would be linked by these identical objects, twin gargoyles watching over them both from mantel or sill. He and his mother began the rest of their day, preparing Christmas dinner, calling friends, taking a walk together along the beach as far as they could go, to Cow Bay in one direction and the seaplane port in the other. At one point, walking past an immense clean ling cod skeleton, one of the few remaining vestiges of the fish kill, his mother surprised him by saying she was afraid those fish hadn’t been fish at all, but canaries. Glancing over, he noted her steady but elderly gait, her frail curls light as ashes, troubled by the slightest breeze. He figured that if suburban old ladies with not much life left to lose now talked this way — that is, as advocates for Greenpeace — then the planet indeed must be in trouble. The weight of this notion grounded him for the rest of the walk. Apparently each breath you took, even up here, was minutely tainted. It was eerie and B-movie, but he didn’t find it hard to see everything man-made — docks, a distant ship, the houses behind them — as somehow already vacant.
