Advocate

by Darren Greer

  Henry came over. My mother asked him point-blank in the kitchen what they should do.

  “It seems to me,” Henry said, in his laconic way, “that you should call a funeral home in Halifax. Maybe they could prepare him.”

  My mother had tried the funeral home in Trenton, and they too had given her a feeble excuse. She took Henry’s advice, and had Jeanette call Halifax. It took her a while, but eventually they found one that would do it. “They’ll pick up the body from the hospital, take it back to the city, prepare him, and bring him back for the funeral. It’s going to cost a pretty penny,” my aunt said.

  “Mom can pay for it,” my mother said. “It’s the least she can do.”

  “As for the funeral,” Henry said, “I can call Lutheran and United on the other side. I know the ministers there.”

  “Would you?” said my mother.

  Henry spent a half hour on the phone with each of them. “The Lutherans,” he told us, “won’t do it at all. Said he’s not a member of the faith. The United said they would, but not with the body, like the Catholics. The pastor was real sympathetic, and said he very much wanted to, but his congregation wouldn’t let him. Seems they’ve already discussed it. Too many of them think having the body in there will contaminate the place. The pastor called them ‘foolish,’ but said his hands are tied.”

  “Idiots,” my mother said.

  “Not so fast,” said Henry. “The pastor said he’d officiate if you need him. He suggested you try the church on the reserve if others don’t do it.”

  “Forget the church,” Jeanette said. “We’ll just do it outside.”

  “You can’t do it outside with the body, Jeanette,” said my mother. “Think, would you!”

  My mother didn’t mean this. She was tired, and so busy fighting the town even now that she wasn’t allowed to grieve properly. Henry asked if it wouldn’t be better if he dealt with all these details. “I know I’m not family, and I don’t know if your brother would have wanted it, but …”

  “He loved you, Henry,” said Jeanette. “I’m sure he’d be honoured.” “Okay then,” said Henry. “I’ll get back to you.”

  After he was gone there was nothing to say, and the house was quiet again. Jeanette said she was going for a nap. My mother asked what I wanted for supper.

  “Nothing,” I told her. “I’m not hungry.”

  “You’ll have to keep your strength up, Jacob. The next few days will be trying.”

  They were. The next few years would be, as far as I was concerned. I went back to my uncle’s room. The bed was still unmade — sheeted and forlorn. I pressed play on the ghetto blaster — my ghetto blaster — Jeanette had placed in the room for my uncle in his final days, and listened to the sweet sounds of Haydn. He was my uncle’s favourite composer. I was not a wistful boy. I did not think in terms of kind recollections and soft memories. I saw only death in that room. The strongest memory of my uncle I would carry in the album of my mind was of the flies around his mouth. I shut the tape player off and retreated into my own room, which is where I would stay pretty much for the next six years.

  3

  “millicent mcneil asked in her final days,” Father Harry says to us, “that her grandson Jacob say a few words at her Mass. So I’ll ask him to come up here and do that.”

  Every eye in the church is upon me as I stand before the casket. There must be two hundred people, and they all must be thinking the same thing. What is he going to say? They all know the relationship. They all know what I do for a living. Perhaps they expect vitriol and anger, the way I expected it myself when Father Harry first told me about this.

  I do not give them what they want.

  I should be nervous. I am not good in front of people at the best of times, and to be up here should be terrifying. But it is not.

  I am not a religious man, or even a spiritual one. I believe we make our own destinies, and I do not believe we should put ourselves or our power in the hands of others to absolve us, to let ourselves off the hook. But I feel calm, almost guided.

  I’m not sure when the idea came to me, or when I decided to leave Jeanette’s eulogy folded up in my blazer pocket and go it alone. I certainly had no idea of it when I entered the church, and through the Mass I was thinking only of the past, as I always did when it came to my grandmother. But when I got the cue from Father Harry it came to me.

  I knew, and perhaps I’d always known, exactly what to do.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  my grandmother stayed in her room for the three days before my uncle’s funeral. The reserve had indeed offered its church and cemetery. My mother and Jeanette picked out his spot. The band council didn’t charge them for the space.

  “You can visit whenever you like,” Darcy told them. “Your family is always welcome here.”

  It was then my mother and Jeanette asked if they could, one day, be buried beside him. They were told they could. I have been to visit my uncle’s grave, to lay flowers. My mother and Jeanette and Deanny and Henry also go.

  As far as I know, my grandmother has not once been to see it.

  She could not give him this much.

  My uncle’s funeral was at two on a Wednesday. There was no eulogy planned. There was no point, because very few people who knew him would be there. And no eulogy could be given that didn’t mention the awful events surrounding his death, so my aunt and mother decided against it. It was to be a simple funeral. The casket was closed. No one wanted to see his ravaged body. The word aids was never mentioned.

  After the reserve offered their church, the United pastor made good on his promise to officiate. My mother had called Father Orlis herself and asked if he was going to attend, but gave up on him when he did not give her a straight answer. Deacon Harry wanted to go, but Father Orlis forbade him. It wasn’t proper, he was told, as Uncle David had been a sinner and had not been given the last rites. Apparently the deacon had not told him about hearing Uncle David’s last confession.

  The most noticeable absence was not Father Orlis, or the deacon, or anyone from town. On the morning of the funeral my mother called out the time to my grandmother several times to make sure she was getting ready. When it was time and she was still not downstairs, my mother and Jeanette went to get her. They found her in her housecoat, not prepared.

  I was not there for the conversation. I heard shouting from where I sat in the kitchen. When they came down I asked where Grandnan was.

  “She’s sick,” Aunt Jeanette said. “She’s not going.”

  My mother was crying, and I got the distinct feeling it was not over my uncle. I was only twelve but I understood how wrong this was. I ran past my mother and Jeanette and up the stairs into my grandmother’s room. She was sitting on the side of her bed in her housecoat. It looked as if she had been crying also.

  “Grandnan!” I said. “You have to go.” It was my first act of protest, after a lifetime of quiescence.

  “I can’t, Jacob,” she said. “I’m too sick.”

  “But it’s his funeral!”

  My mother came back up and pulled me from the room. “I can’t believe you’re doing this. Your own son, for heaven’s sake. Even Jacob knows how wrong it is.”

  “What am I to do, Caroline? Do you want me vomiting all over the floor?”

  “If you’re sick,” said my mother, “you’ve made yourself sick.”

  “Go,” said my grandmother. “You’ll be late.”

  “All the world you care,” said my mother.

  My grandmother’s motivation for not going to that funeral is still obscure to me. Perhaps it was her sickness. Or her guilt. Or her fear. Perhaps she didn’t want to face her behaviour those last few months. Her refusal to acknowledge or help her son. I’ve no idea. But it was the final blow.

  We went in Jeanette’s Pinto. No one, not even the pastor, asked where my grandmother was. The service was short, as unadorned as the little church itself. The pastor read the more obvious passages from the King James Bible. Whoever
believeth in me and In my father’s house there are many mansions and the Twenty-Third Psalm. It wasn’t true.

  Not a word of it.

  David did not believe in God, so he couldn’t have been comforted by the last rights. I realized then, for the first time, and in exactly the same manner as I knew I was gay, that I did not believe in God either.

  The only people we knew in the church were Henry, Darcy, Deanny — who wore a purple dress, because she didn’t own a black one — Fred, Nurse Jones, and Nurse Cassandra, who had driven down from Halifax. Everyone else was from the reserve. No one from the town had come.

  When it was over, my uncle’s casket was carried out of the church and across the road into the cemetery by six men from the reserve. This part of the ceremony was most memorable by who was not there. It was defined by absence rather than attendance. When the pastor said the ashes-to-ashes I was stricken by anger. It was then I began to build my most serious resentments against my grandmother and the town, as I watched my mother and Jeanette go through what they did. I hated the town. I swore that when I got older I would make noise. I would never let them forget this.

  I kept that promise, after a fashion. I think my grandmother knew, in later years, I could never forgive her for not going to Uncle David’s funeral. She was contrite around me. She let me argue theology and evolution all I wanted, because she knew that I had been watching, that I was, in a sense, the only one who kept the memory fresh and alive long after her own daughters had forgiven her. I did not respond to her authority after that day, and she did not try to enforce it on me.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  with those events from the distant past in mind, I begin my grandmother’s eulogy. Not to shame her, but to place her at the funeral she should have been to.

  “On a warm summer afternoon in late July of 1952, a day not dissimilar to today, my uncle David was pedalling up Tenerife Street as fast as he could go. He was eight years old.”

  The congregation suddenly sits up straighter, galvanized by my words.

  With no doubt about what to say, I continue. “I know this story, for I heard my uncle telling my mother and my aunt about it before he died. He talked a lot about his childhood, and my friend Bernadette and I listened. I think he was trying to relive it, to make some sense out of what his life had become, to explain what he knew was a senseless death.”

  I look at Deanny in the front row, sitting beside my mother. She is smiling. Perhaps she knew what was coming. She may have done the same if given the chance.

  “The front wheel of my uncle’s bicycle fell off,” I say. “My grandfather had assembled it earlier that afternoon, and he had not tightened all its lug nuts sufficiently. When the wheel flew off, the bike collapsed onto its front forks and David sailed headfirst out over the handlebars and landed in a crumple on the street. His arms and legs and face were scraped. Two of the neighbours heard him scream. They — you — came running out of your houses. And more neighbours came. Soon there was a knot of people gathered around young David. You soothed him. You brushed him off. You brought out warm water and face cloths and cleaned him up and bandaged his hurt. There were no serious injuries. A few minor scrapes.

  “My uncle was very sick when he reminded his mother of this story. ‘How good it felt,’ he said. ‘Having all those people worried about me. Taking care of me. I’ve never forgotten that.’

  “I wish you had been there. Maybe you would have understood why what was done to my uncle was so wrong. It was a betrayal of the child you helped to raise. I wish sometimes I knew who those neighbours were exactly. I would ask you if you remembered my uncle as a boy and taking care of him that time, if you remember your refusal to do the same when he really needed it.”

  And so I give my uncle’s eulogy instead. The one he never had. I tell them more stories about his childhood. The fishing derbies. The brass and the cinema. How when he was fourteen he had a poem published in a national teachers’ magazine. The town was so proud of him then. His picture had been published beside his poem in the Gazette. It had hung framed in my grandfather’s den. I tell them about his travels. To France, Germany, Japan. I wonder, as I’m speaking, if David knew that one day I would bear witness to his life. I talk about his job, his passion for teaching, his love of literature, his failed effort at reading War and Peace, which somehow now seemed symbolic of something but lay just beyond my comprehension. I talk about his homosexuality, and my own. And then finally the aids virus. I hold nothing back. I educate them. I quote statistics. I examine the town’s reaction to him, and to the virus, in 1984. The cancelling of the parade, the manner in which they reacted to his death, their absence at his funeral. I tell the story and speak the words that my grandmother never allowed to be spoken. I expect some of them to leave, but none do. Many lower their heads and refuse to look at me, but all stay in the church.

  “In Toronto a few days ago a man I know tried to commit suicide because of the same disease that killed my uncle David. Schooled by people like you into thinking what he had was shameful, that it was somehow his fault. We should be forced to make up to these people for how we have treated them, and for what we have done. My grandmother left me a substantial amount of money, which I plan on using to help those living with aids in the city in which I now dwell.”

  Suddenly it strikes me. What my grandmother had meant when she said in her will do something here. It was a private communication, from her to me, no one else would understand it. It was her final act of contrition, her final admission; her last confession, and a way to buy salvation. Suddenly I am certain this is what she wanted.

  “Of the money my grandmother left me, she wished me to take some of it and build a monument in Founder’s Park dedicated to those who have been affected in Advocate by aids. On it will be inscribed the names of our victims of the aids crisis.

  “I think my grandmother knew when she asked me to deliver this eulogy what I would say and do. I speak now on her behalf, what I think she wanted to say at the end of her life but could not. Advocate is a small town, and what happened here certainly happened elsewhere. But I am giving you a chance to redeem yourself. She was seeking forgiveness not just for herself but for all of you. Do as she asked. Build the monument. Honour my uncle David. Do for him now what none of you could do for him then. Thus far, and to my knowledge, the only name that would be inscribed on such a monument will be David Owen Angus William McNeil, born August 17, 1944, died October 21 1984. Let us hope there is never another.”

  I run out of words. When I sit down beside my mother the church is silent. They wait for Father Harry to continue. He seems moved by my eulogy. He does not immediately rouse himself to the task of finishing the Mass. When he does, he stands, clears his throat, and says the final prayers. The casket is lifted and carried out by the pallbearers.

  The rain falls on us as we make our way out of the church. It is a cold benediction.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  as we pass from the church commons into the cemetery, as lovely and peaceful now as I found it all those years ago, even in the rain, Jeanette catches up with me. She is unable to contain herself. “When did you think of a monument?” she whispers.

  I shrug. “Right then, as I was speaking. It was what Grandnan wanted, I think. A public way to atone.”

  “It’s brilliant,” Jeanette says. Of course my aunt would think so. Ever the radical. Ever believing words emblazoned on signs and etched in stone could make a difference.

  I have decided what words will be inscribed on my uncle’s monument. The quote I had come across in War and Peace.

  “Lay me down like a stone oh God, and raise me up like a new bread.”

  At the last, my uncle would be a better advocate than we were. His words would never be drowned out, or burned in the fire pit behind my grandmother’s house. They would stand long after the rest of us were dead.

  Father Harry intones the words for the committal of the dead, as the mourners stand in the rain and watch my grandmother’s
casket being lowered into the ground. She will be the last person buried here, and with her goes a certain way of looking at and dealing with the world. When the prayer is finished the mourners, led by Jeanette and my mother, reach for handfuls of dirt to throw on the casket while Harry recites the Lord’s Prayer. Long ago my grandmother had explained the significance of the dirt to me. “It’s a reminder of our own mortality,” she said. “A goodbye to the person we have lost. An act of burying the dead, and a realistic view of our life on earth.” I reach into my pocket and take out the St. Jude’s medallion my mother had given me that morning. I throw it into my grandmother’s grave. The Lemon Day and Orange Day parades are over. The marches have begun.

  Acknowledgements

  ■

  I would like to acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts and Arts Nova Scotia for their generous financial support during the writing of this novel. I would also like to thank for their ongoing support Alison Smith, Barb Lush, Jo-Anne Lenethen, and my parents Charles and Yvonne Greer.