The Erratics

by Vicki Laveau-Harvie

  Chapter 13

  There is a reason why people who live in the country go to bed when the chickens do, as the sun sets.

  It’s too lonely otherwise, out here in the thick black dark. No one can hear you scream. So immense and poignant, intraversable, is the distance between you and the one yard-light you can see burning on a property across the valley, so alien are you to the night creatures’ real life-and-death dramas playing out with implacable predictability in the grasses and the trees around you, that you may as well just go to bed.

  It’s what we are doing. My father, too exhausted to speak, shuffles off down the hall to his room. I negotiate my way carefully across a stretch of parquet flooring leading to my room, feeling like Alice in Cuckooland and lifting my feet like a Lipizzan dancing horse, stepping carefully around pickle jars, cans of tomatoes, boxes of salt and bicarb of soda, and the occasional pot-lid, all of these disparate objects marking the spots where someone has tried to glue down the wood inlays that have come unstuck and lifted. These things are here so that no one will walk on these spots, but for a fleeting moment I wonder if it is an alarm system invented by my mother to keep me from escaping into the night, a fracas machine to trap me here. Even as I think this, I have a vision of my mother’s influence making its way through my father’s mind, filling the tiny spaces left by the rounded contours of his brain, solidifying around the synapses until not even his thoughts are his own.

  I brush my teeth in a bathroom where a number of the white tiles with gilt flecks are held to the wall by bandaids of various sizes and types. The stretchy cloth ones are doing the best job.

  From the doorway of the room I have been assigned, I can see into the big sitting room where my mother is reading in the same wing chair my father occupied when telling me his war story. She has explained to me that she never sleeps, that she hasn’t slept for eight years. She sits up all night, every night, in order to wake my father every half hour because, she tells me, he stops breathing. She told my sister this, on the phone some years ago, and my sister replied that this not sleeping for years was incompatible with life. Missing the point, my mother agreed with her.

  It’s no wonder they both look so dreadful.

  My mother is reading Isabel Allende in the original Spanish. She has always wished it to be known that she reads everything of importance in all the major European languages. She and my father journey regularly, I will learn, to a large chain bookstore in a South Calgary mall, where they have a personal shopper called Mary, who recommends books and orders my mother’s foreign language works. This feat is seen by my mother as something akin to getting the Dead Sea Scrolls delivered.

  Tonight, it is true that my mother does not move from this chair. I know this because the door of my bedroom doesn’t shut and I have line of sight from the doorway. I get up and look periodically. Her head descends about two inches an hour until her face meets her book and her neck is at a right angle to the rest of her spine. She could snap something if she jerked awake.

  This bedroom does not have happy memories for me. I slept here for one night eighteen years ago on my way to Australia on a visit with my children who did not know their grandparents. I thought they should meet them and my mother insisted that we stay here.

  I slept in this room in this same bizarre king-single four-poster about a metre off the floor. My children were supposed to be sleeping with me but fell heavily off the edges. I settled them on the floor in quilts. My husband slept on the plastic cover of a white brocade sofa in the sitting room and my mother sat all night in the same chair she is in tonight, four feet behind my husband. My sister and her family drove up from the Badlands and slept in a camper van in the drive.

  It didn’t end well.

  I don’t expect to sleep, but I hunker down under the same multiple quilts and crocheted throws as eighteen years before to ponder the weirdness at dinner.

  To say that the dinner-table conversation was stilted would be to accord it a grace and spontaneity it lacked. My father was silent except when he rallied to respond to my occasional comments about the food, the excellence of the asparagus, a new bunch, freshly boiled, not the first ruined batch.

  Yes, good, he would say, raising his watery blue gaze from his plate to my face for a moment. There was a coyote in the fir trees a mile down the slope who was trying to help, but nobody was paying him any attention either.

  My mother was clearly torn between two courses of action: freezing me out in total silence or demonstrating an off-the-scale graciousness and social savvy by rising above a difficult situation forced upon her by her daughter.

  As I spoke of the carrots a second time, I watched these two impulses duke it out behind my mother’s raven-black eyebrows. Social one-upmanship won out and she decided to make conversation, but this put her in as much of a pickle as I was for choice of topic. She was clearly not going to acknowledge me in any way. There would be no polite questions about the length of my trip or about how many children I might have now. And she was determined not to give me any information about herself or my father.

  She began to speak at length about someone she called ‘our little girl’, a toddler apparently, but so advanced, so good, so interested in the piano, sitting on my mother’s knee and touching the keys reverently. At a loss, I looked to my father but he continued to fix his cutlery, no help at all, as I tried to imagine who this child was.

  My mother’s monologue was interrupted by a rap at the door. This is the country and people don’t just happen by at night, but at this point I would have welcomed home invaders. My mother disappeared and seconds later, I heard a wail, and cries of ‘Oh, no, not my little girl!’ Alarmed, I rose, but found my father looking at me fixedly. He shook his head, just once, and pointed at my chair. I sat back down.

  Long minutes of wailing later, my mother returned, looking composed and carrying a coffee cake, kindly prepared by people I presume to be neighbours who must also be related to the little mystery girl. The child fell from a swing and broke her arm, my mother announced, and would be in plaster for the foreseeable. Shaking her head, she lamented this interruption to the child’s apprenticeship of correct hand position at the piano.

  When morning comes, I wake and realise that I have slept after all. I must have, because across the foot of the bed is one of my father’s dressing gowns that wasn’t there last night. It’s paisley, put there by him for me to wear. I bury my face in it, hoping for a hint of his soap or his aftershave, but it smells of nothing. I put it on and go to breakfast. My mother is nowhere to be seen.

  It is no later than ten o’clock when we finish and my father tells me that we need to go out to lunch now, because we have exhausted my mother and she needs the house to herself.

  Right now?

  We have exhausted her, he replies. We need to go. We’re going to lunch in Shawnessy.

  As we leave, my mother appears. She tilts her head back, stares down her nose at me and says, You won’t be seeing me again.

  You don’t get to decide that, I say, and as I walk out the door, I hear her remind my father that we need to go to Shawnessy. Shawnessy is where we need to go for lunch.

  My parents have an oversize town car which we don’t take, and a big, posh flatbed pick-up truck with a module on the back, which we climb up into. My father fumbles with the keys and tentatively tries shifting the gears. He has obviously not driven anything for a long time.

  What’s in Shawnessy? I ask. Why do we have to go there? Why can’t we just go to Okotoks? It’s five miles away. I’d like to see Okotoks again.

  He doesn’t answer and I drop it to let him concentrate on driving. I know he is concentrating because his shoulders are hunched up about his ears and we are inching along the middle of the dirt road that leads to the highway so slow we aren’t even raising dust. It takes twenty minutes to drive the mile and a half to the stop sign where the dirt meets Highway 2.

  My father indicates a left turn and suddenly I am incensed. Suddenly I
understand why we have to go to Shawnessy for lunch. To get to Shawnessy, you turn left at this stop sign, across three lanes of traffic coming toward you from Calgary, mostly eighteen-wheelers going to the US, drivers blood-shot and wired, speeding. Once you get to the median strip, you go left and seek to merge as best you can into the wall of traffic coming north towards you.

  My mother knows my father cannot conceivably execute this manoeuvre.

  I watch my father exert a feather-light pressure on the accelerator and we creep forward, perpendicular to the traffic screaming three abreast toward us.

  I undo my seat belt and slide a bit to the left. Seconds go by like minutes as I try to calculate the tipping point, the instant when I will need to stomp on my father’s foot as it rests on the accelerator and pray we don’t stall; the microsecond when I will wrest the steering wheel from him and turn it a quarter turn to the left, just enough to bring us up on the grass strip in the middle of the highway without capsizing us.

  I refuse without even thinking about it to finish like this, a smear inside the crushed cabin of this dolled-up ute driven by a tentative old gentleman who won’t survive this either and who hasn’t been behind the wheel of anything for a decade. I won’t be two minutes on the evening news and a paragraph in the Okotoks Chronicle, part of a prairie apocalypse of overturned semis with their wheels spinning silently in the pale autumn sunlight, a load of steel beams spearing across the road in front of people just trying to get to work, frozen beef carcasses waving their legs at odd angles in the brown grass and crates of chickens puffing blood-stained feathers into the breeze. I won’t be condemned to a gruesome and spectacular photo-on-page-two death because of my senseless compulsion to try to do the right thing by my parents.

  My father glances at me. Busy road, he says. Bunch of nuts driving too fast. He pulls himself closer to the steering wheel and floors it.

  Chapter 14

  Holy crap, Dad, I say, as the rocking subsides and he slows to what seems a normal speed to him, about forty kilometres an hour, and we merge with the traffic going north which is forced to take a step to the right, just like doing the time-warp again, in order to avoid us. I think we may have taken that turn on two wheels, but I am wary of embellishing like the heroes of old, who thought about how the song celebrating their feats was going to sound. Whatever.

  Do your seat belt up, he says. That’s dangerous.

  No shit, Sherlock, I say, amazed at what is coming out of my mouth. I don’t sound like me at all. I am momentarily unable to make a sentence that contains a verb and does not include poo. I stare out the window at a car that slows up beside us, the driver giving me the international sign for crazy out of your mind, forefinger circling the ear, eyebrows skyward. I reply with a minute shrug and an eye-roll, which could mean anything. Not even I know what I mean.

  We’re seeing a lot of non-verbal communication out here, since our Fangio turn. As irate people whoosh by us, some give us the finger. Those would be the folks from south of the US border. Truckers too high up in their rigs for me to see them lean on their bullhorns with surprising Doppler effect, deafening everybody. Locals shake their heads disapprovingly and wag fingers at us as they go by.

  You’re in the passing lane, Dad, I tell him. You aren’t making friends here.

  I know, he says. I need to stay in this lane. I’m turning left again up there. He points to the horizon. When I whimper, he chuckles and I figure just hearing that makes quite a lot of this worthwhile, but I will need to live to tell the tale for that to be true.

  After some miles, there is a large intersection with traffic lights, left-turn arrows and slip lanes, all of which Dad negotiates without incident and we coast into the service road for the Shawnessy strip mall. My worst suspicions are confirmed. There may be nice places to eat in Shawnessy somewhere, and my mother may have been intending that we go eat at one of them, but on the evidence before my eyes, I don’t buy it. We park in front of the Cheeky Chicken Diner – there is no dearth of places to park – and we go in. I object when the waitperson tries to seat us on spindly chairs at a table in the window. I ask for a booth, and say that my father would be more comfortable there. All the booths are empty. There are only three guys having coffee at the counter.

  We order the early-bird lunch special, it being only 11.30 and all. While we wait for our food, I go to the payphone and call my uncle. He asks how I am and I say, Good, fine, well. Not dead. Could you come and get me? Maybe have coffee with me and Dad?

  When I tell him where, he says, Why are you in Shawnessy?

  Good question, I tell him. Or long story, or maybe both.

  He clears his throat. Ok, he says. Sit tight.

  I tell my father that his brother is coming to meet us. He isn’t best pleased and just chews morosely on his chicken without responding, but I don’t care.

  I’ve always heard that these two brothers do not get on, never have. The story is that my uncle was my grandfather’s favourite and my father my grandmother’s, and this created enmity. I wonder why nobody ever mentions the oldest brother, a civil servant who hung out with trainers and jockeys at the tracks in his spare time and knew how to make money on the horses. Was he nobody’s favourite?

  I want to see my father and my uncle together, without my mother there to light the envy and stoke the resentment. I want to know if there is a spark of family feeling, an iota of affection. I need to see for myself how bad this bit is. I am now viewing my trip here as a kind of fact-finding mission, the establishing of a personal base-line reading on the scale of family horrible.

  I’m arranging this little kaffeeklatsch for my uncle too, because I know that he has often driven to my parents’ and knocked at the door. I know he has stood in the drive under falling leaves and snowflakes, and when the lilacs were in bloom, a man of all seasons positioning himself to be visible from the house, knowing they were in there, and hoping his brother would show himself. He never did.

  If I am honest, I don’t mind that my father is annoyed at me for calling my uncle, because I am now seriously pissed off. A few minutes ago, sitting in this booth, I suggested to my father that when I see him tomorrow and the day after, because I am staying three days, he should drive to Okotoks and I can meet him there. No, he said. We’ve had a good visit. We’ll leave it like this. He didn’t look at me when he said this.

  Up to now, I haven’t been counting, not the money or the time, or the mind-numbing fifteen hours non-stop in a plane, over water the whole time, next to a woman who told me I needed to know that she had a problem with wind, and thereafter only spoke to me once, snapping the window shade up and inviting me to admire clouds that had to be, according to her, the white cliffs of Dover.

  I have not counted my uncle’s miles behind the wheel, my sister’s anguish, the cost of facing down my mother. All because I got to see my father.

  He won’t get a hero’s welcome when and if he makes it home, and I know he has to survive. There is no way he can see me again without aggravating my mother’s anger. I understand that he has made his bed. I get it but I don’t have to like it. I am the camel with the extra straw on it. So I smile and say, What fun for you, to see your brother. What a treat.

  In Hong Kong, outside important buildings and especially banks, you see two big stone dragon lions guarding the entrance, facing outwards into the world and scanning far horizons for danger, ready to pounce and protect, their manes etched flowingly into the stone they are carved from.

  My father and my uncle look a bit like that, two old cats with still fullish manes of white hair, sitting in identical poses on either side of the booth, angled outwards from it and looking at the hardware wholesaler on the opposite side of the parking lot, speaking sparingly of the weather and the traffic on Highway 2. I sit crammed in one corner of the booth and watch them, deciding that there isn’t much to be salvaged, and sorry I have put my uncle in this position. My father is inside himself, resentment rusted on.

  They both look r
elieved when I finish my coffee and clatter my cup back onto its saucer. My father insists on paying, stands smartly up and heads for the cashier. My uncle offers to follow my dad’s pick-up truck back to my parents’ place if I want to ride with my father, and to take me back to McKenzie Towne with him from the gate.

  Thank you, I say, but there isn’t enough oil in Alberta to get me back in that truck. Dad should make it home because he will be turning right the whole way. I’m coming with you.

  My cousin, whom I have not seen for decades, cuts short a holiday in Montana where she is driving around with her husband looking at Old West landscapes and artefacts that must pretty much resemble what we see around here, and motors back to Canada to see me. On the day left free by my father’s refusal to see me again, she, her husband, my uncle and my aunt, ask me what I would like to do.

  I have done nothing to deserve the kindness these people show me. Although I am sure that the idea holds little appeal for them, they spend the next day driving me with good grace around the little towns of my childhood along the Cowboy Trail: Okotoks, Black Diamond, Turner Valley, places I was hoping to visit with my father.

  Somewhere in the town of Black Diamond lives my earliest memory.

  I am two, and my mother has set me down in the snow in the front yard of the tiny frame house we live in, to play. I am wearing a fire-engine red snowsuit with a hood, white fur around my face, mittens caked with snow and a scarf across my mouth to breathe through so my lungs don’t freeze.

  I am sitting quietly, watching the diamonds the sun brings forth from the smooth surface of the snow, when a dark figure swoops in and scoops me up. I have no time to be afraid, even though I do not know that this big man, bundled up in his thick overcoat, with a hat and a scarf and gloves, is my father, back from some months working in the oilfields of Texas (just like Alberta, he will always tell us, only with more guns). He wheels around in the blinding snow and swings me high into the profound and hopeful perfection of the porcelain blue sky. He is laughing and I laugh too, ice crystals sparkling on my eyelashes, little puffs of breath escaping through my scarf.