Man Descending

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  “Looking Glass indicated he could begin to walk. The young bucks expectantly fingered their lances and edged forward, impatient at the restraints imposed by their chief. But Looking Glass had set the trial and conditions. They dared not defy him. Sam Waters would be unarmed and naked, but he would be given a hundred-yard head start before the braves were loosed in pursuit.

  “Twenty yards out Sam spat grimly. What the hell? he thought. He paused and waggled his bare ass derisively at his captors. There was a howl of rage. ‘Huh sutkis weepa hupka, kaksakis nuhka!’ he taunted them in their own tongue. Let’s play dog. You sniff my ass and I’ll growl.

  “On he walked, hardly aware of the bedlam he had created. He didn’t feel the cold. He was preoccupied only with making the river three long miles away. He marshalled his strength. In a moment, he would be running for his life. Running barefooted across sharp rocks that would slash his feet, and cacti that would lodge their wicked needles in his flesh. He would have to disregard the pain and press on. And when he reached the icy river, running fast with snow melt and whirling with ice cakes, he would have to plunge in and allow the current to sweep his exhausted body downriver either to his death or to salvation.”

  I scrape along past the neighbourhood Texaco station where I buy my gas. Ernie the pump jockey waves to me.

  “When Sam heard the whoops behind him he sped away. He didn’t look behind. He didn’t need to. Sam knew the lithe, ochre-streaked bodies were hot on his heels, closing fast, trying to get into range for a spear cast that would bring down the great Bull Head, the white warrior.”

  Past the shopping mall. A young matron pauses from loading her grocery bags in the trunk to watch me go by. Does she imagine that I am pursued by Brass Pot, Trader Bell and Wakshee, and does she know they are gaining on me? I pick up the pace.

  “A spent lance skittered off the rocks by his legs. Sam’s energy was flagging. His lungs burned, his chest heaved, sweat coursed down his brow into his eyes. He glanced down at his feet. A bloody pulp.

  “A coulee. He staggered down one slope, branches whipping his face, ploughed through a spring drift spraying the snow with specks of blood, scrabbled up the opposite bank, fingers tearing at the earth.”

  Easy does it! Make Cameron Crescent, swing back on 14th Street and coast home.

  “Sam could see the cold grey river flecked with ice floes as it snaked along. But the cries of the braves behind him were more distinct and had a triumphant note. One final effort. He began to sprint. A lance whistled past his head. He began to zigzag, darting and twisting to elude his pursuers.”

  A car horn blasts sharply behind me and a guy in a grey Buick forces me up on the sidewalk. I hadn’t realized it, but in sympathy with Sam I had been weaving from side to side down the road, dodging Shoshone missiles.

  I press on for home, a public spectacle. A couple of kids even go so far as to follow me on their bicycles, giggling and chanting, “Go man, go!” like onlookers urging on a ledge jumper. Maybe it is their intent to rifle my pockets for change when I collapse. But I disappoint them. In fact, at the very moment Sam is clawing his way out of the river shivering, retching and coughing, miles upstream and safe from his howling captors, I am fitting my key in my lock; coughing and retching. I have gone a considerable way my first time out. Perhaps as far as a mile.

  I showed up at the River Run. But only to watch Victoria run. She did a lovely job, and I was proud of her although I didn’t tell her so. There was a man waiting for her at the finish with a thermos and a sponge.

  I am not trying to fool myself or anyone else when I say that I could have completed the run if I had chosen to enter. By September 14 I was running six miles a day and had dropped seventeen pounds through hard work and fervent fasting. I am quite sincere and honest in saying that I could have – no, would have – finished it if I had ever toed the starting-line. It was that knowledge which gave me the strength to refrain from making a point that would have meant nothing.

  I’ve changed in some ways. They are difficult to describe fairly and accurately. For instance, my domestic habits haven’t improved much. My dishes are seldom done punctually. I don’t barge in on Victoria or even phone her any more. But I still sometimes sit outside her apartment in my car, plotting extravagant schemes to regain her love. Even though I don’t believe in their efficacy any more.

  But then again I’ve found myself a job. They can’t keep a good man down forever. I’m a salesman in the chinaware department in Eaton’s. I’d be lying if I claimed I liked my work, but I can bear it. It sure the hell beats working in a community college as I did before.

  In a month and a half I’ve learned all the patterns, never been late for work, or obviously insulted a customer. Mrs. McCuish, my supervisor, is quite taken with the way I handle the old biddies. I have discovered a latent and surprising talent for the jollification and pacification of the blue-haired hags who stalk our aisles searching out that special piece for that “set” which has been growing like a cancer in their china cabinets since their marriages forty-five years ago. As Kierkegaard suggested, I find myself constantly amazed by my capacity to absorb abuse.

  Speaking of Kierkegaard, he is slowly supplanting Sam Waters as my guide through life’s pitfalls. I’ve discovered that his approach is much more relevant to life in a department store than Sam’s. Sam is dying a slow death as I continue to transfer his story to paper. He has lost some of the importance he had when he resided principally in my imagination.

  No, it’s Soren whom I contemplate as I fondle a piece of Doulton and make ecstatic faces across the counter at some dame who is starting a daughter-in-law off as a collector. Continuing the family tradition.

  It is Soren I think of when I ask myself why I gave up Victoria. As he forsook Regine, did I forsake Victoria? No. I merely understood that I would only embitter her by surprising her at this late date. She needed to be done with me. And my completing the River Run would only anger her by confusing the picture of me that she had built up over our years together.

  That’s not to say that I intend to leave it at that. I am going to show her I can finish something. The something is my Western, my story of Sam and his tribulations. Victoria will get a xerox copy of the manuscript in the mail. If she shows it to her friends or even Benny I won’t care. They’ll laugh, of course, and perhaps even doubt my sanity, or ponder the pass I’ve come to – selling plates and writing dusters.

  I’ve already chosen an epigraph to my book, from Kierkegaard’s Journals. It’s my apology to Victoria and my admission that she was right all along. A kind of absolution that may surprise her, and, I hope, touch her. You see, she always expected more of me.

  Soren wrote: “What ability there is in an individual may be measured by the yardstick of how far there is between his understanding and his will. What a person can understand he must also be able to force himself to will. Between understanding and willing is where excuses and evasions have their being.”

  Afterword

  BY LEO MCKAY JR.

  A very good book is a mystery and should remain a mystery no matter how many times we read it. This mysteriousness is part of the ineffability of all art and what makes it possible to re-approach freshly a familiar painting or a piece of music. That we never fully solve the mystery of a work of art enables that work to yield new insights and perspectives even after multiple revisits.

  I’ve read Man Descending many times, and each time I’ve noticed some new detail, some previously overlooked gem of description. The full impact of the following sentence, for example, taken from “The Watcher,” escaped me until the most recent reading: “So I luxuriated in this steamy equatorial climate, tended by a doting mother as if I were a rare tropical orchid.” Aside from its succinct beauty in describing the character’s sickly childhood, the mix of hard and soft consonants makes the sentence itself patter and squish with moisture.

  The tautly controlled poetry of the prose stands out to me now as never before. Notice the
rhythm of the following paragraph, taken from later in the same story:

  A thunderstorm was brewing. The sky was a stew of dark, swollen cloud and a strange apple-green light. The temperature stood in the mid-nineties, not a breath of breeze stirred, my skin crawled and my head pounded above my eyes and through the bridge of my nose. There wasn’t a thing to do except sit on the bottom step of the porch, keep from picking up a sliver in your ass, and scratch the dirt with a stick. My grandmother had put her hat on and driven into town on some unexplained business. Thompson and my aunt were upstairs in their bedroom, sunk in a stuporous, sweaty afternoon’s sleep.

  There are many such paragraphs in this book, short sections that could stand on their own as poems, so electrifying are the images, so powerful the language.

  Guy Vanderhaeghe notices startling details and renders them on the page so that they in turn startle the reader. “Poplar bluffs in the distance shook in the watery heat haze with a crazy light, crows whirled lazily in the sky like flakes of black ash rising from a fire” (“Reunion”).

  These stories reveal Vanderhaeghe’s remarkable social eye. He takes note of how people interact, how they treat each other, how they view each other. In the following sentence, the protagonist of “The Expatriates’ Party” is visiting England and commenting on how he regards his hosts. “He was sorry to see the English look like the landlords of boarding-houses, possessors of a testy dignity, forced by straitened circumstances into a touchy hospitality.”

  Interior realities are masterfully evinced here, too. Vanderhaeghe shines a white light into the souls of his characters, making them reveal their luminous selves when presented on the page. “Dieter lay on the chesterfield trying to stifle his tears. It was not an easy job because even the sound of Mrs. Hax unconcernedly clacking the breakfast dishes reminded him of her monstrous carelessness with everything. His plates, his feelings” (“Dancing Bear”). I challenge anyone to find a briefer, more elegant, more revealing description of any character in any book by any writer. There is writing as good as this, but none better.

  Moments of great emotional and physical intensity are realized in Man Descending with a truth that rarely transfers so clearly and powerfully onto the printed page. Again and again and again in these stories, characters’ heads swim with realization or fear or disgust. People turn infirm or ill. Someone scrapes a knuckle, goes bodily numb, peels off and examines a piece of his or her own skin. And in these places, where lesser writers seldom bother to prod or when they do either blur the moment with inexact language or use it merely as a pivot point for plot, the visceral poetry of Vanderhaeghe’s prose transforms the banal into the sublime.

  Ogle, in “A Taste for Perfection,” is slowly losing sensation in his extremities. In an attempt to revivify himself, he makes his way to the hospital’s physical therapy room, where he finds a basketball. As Ogle holds the ball, Vanderhaeghe tells us that “he relished the pebbly grain with his fingertips.” A brief moment of somatic contact described so aptly that in a single sentence we can feel that ball in our own hands, and in doing so enter into Ogle’s experience just long enough to understand the fullness of his desperation.

  At the end of “Dancing Bear,” as Dieter is making his last grab at a measure of autonomy, Vanderhaeghe’s description is so perfect and complete that I always find myself struggling for air as I read the following passage, as though Dieter’s consciousness were closing in around me.

  He tried to get up. He rose, trembling, swayed, felt the floor shift, and fell, striking his head on a chest of drawers. His mouth filled with something warm and salty. He could hear something moving in the house, and then the sound was lost in the tumult of the blood singing in his veins. His pulse beat dimly in his eyelids, his ears, his neck and fingertips.

  He managed to struggle to his feet and beat his way into the roar of the shadows which slipped by like surf, and out into the hallway.

  And then he saw a form in the muted light, patiently waiting. It was the bear.

  “Bear?” he asked, shuffling forward, trailing his leg.

  Vanderhaeghe’s vision in Man Descending is rich and encompassing. He shows us relationships between men and women, men and men, parents and children. He takes us where power meets vulnerability, where violence meets despair. All the gravity of the book is cheered by the half-light of humour. All the humour is tinged with sorrow. Man Descending gives us a lush, generous, fecund view of a complex, difficult, knuckle-barking, beautiful universe.

  I began by saying that a very good book was a mystery. I’ll conclude by saying that great books, aside from being mysteries, reveal a mystery to us. A great book can transform the reader, transform the reader’s perception, transform the world. This is what reading Man Descending does for us. While our eyes are on the pages, we admire the book itself, its breadth, its insight, the mastery of its art. When we lift our eyes from the page, we see the planet as though for the first time. The sparkling particulars of creation are brought into shaper focus. We are given to wonder at the private cosmos of each person we see. We realize anew the endless possibilities of the world.

  Guy Vanderhaeghe

  GUY VANDERHAEGHE was born in Esterhazy, Saskatchewan, in 1951. He received his B.A. (1971) and his M.A. (1975) from the University of Saskatchewan and his B.Ed. (1978) from the University of Regina.

  In his first volume of fiction, twelve stories gathered together under the title Man Descending (1982), Vanderhaeghe recounts the dilemmas and the humiliations of a variety of male characters, ranging in age from childhood to old age. The collection won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and went on to receive the Faber Prize in Great Britain. In his subsequent fiction, which includes two more collections of short stories and four novels, he has won further awards and acclaim, his recent novels being historical fiction of the west.

  In addition to his fiction, Vanderhaeghe has also written two plays: I Had a Job I Liked. Once., which premiered in 1991, and Dancock’s Dance, which premiered in 1995.

  Guy Vanderhaeghe lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

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