“No cost would be too much.”
“I’ve paid my way. Left you without debt. Shop in good shape.”
“Of course, Pa.” Jackie suspected Pa knew about the bank loan, and the purchase of fifty Cuisinart food processors, which had not sold well. “What ships came in today?”
“Three freighters and the Penny Loonan.”
“Clyde built?”
“Monrovian flags. Hulls looked Polish, but don’t distract me. I tell you, we have a problem. A rare problem.”
Pa had gotten himself into a lather, and Jackie could do nothing to distract him. So they sat together and smoked and talked about the problem until Midge came in to cook Pa’s dinner.
Then Jackie left, seven o’clock sharp, back to Karen and his daughter, Elaine, who was sixteen, studying for her exams and smoking a lot of pot. He wondered which side of Elaine he would see tonight: drugged, sleepy, feeding herself in a frenzy, or bent over her books at the kitchen counter. As he walked up the hill he thought about the debt, and Karen’s plans for curtains in the sitting room. She would want him to choose from the samples. He remembered the stairwell leading from Pa’s apartment, the smell of salt rising from the walls. Pa’s right, Jackie thought, they’ll never get a coffin down those narrow stairs.
Now every time Jackie stepped in, his father brought it up. I’ve been ruminating, he would say, about this issue of the coffin. Or, I’ve been wondering. I’ve been thinking. For the forty-five minutes that Jackie and his father sat together, they would talk it through.
One day Jackie brought a drawing he had done on the back of an envelope. He had done it to scale in the quiet of the afternoon, when he should have been tackling the books. “I think,” he said, as soon as he was seated with his cigarette going, “you’ll appreciate the ease of the solution.”
“Is it elegant?”
“It is.”
“I like a little elegance. Give it here.”
Jackie handed the envelope to his father, who laid it flat on the small table between them. The answer Jackie had come up with was elegant—it required only a boat hook drilled into the beam at the top of the stairwell, then a lifting of the coffin’s head at the top door, a spin of the thing at the landing. All this he’d written out neatly, with arrows showing degrees of spin and angles of lift.
“They’ll carry me out standing, will they?” Pa gave a huff, which turned to a cough, which became the hacking of brown stuff into his pocket handkerchief.
Jackie got water from the kitchen tap. When he returned, his father said: “You’ve got your mum’s good handwriting, haven’t you.”
Jackie said nothing. He felt praised to the roots of his hair.
“So what do you think, Pa?”
“About what?” Pa seemed bewildered, then glanced down at the envelope and took a breath. “Just about, lad,” Pa said. “But if you tip me on the vertical, the coffin will hit the ceiling. As for the door jamb—even taking the hinges off won’t do the trick. I think we’re better off thinking about the window. I can tell you, this thing is harder than it looks.”
That night Jackie dreamed of the stairwell, his father standing at the top. He held his cane and wore a satin robe and a fur cap on his head. Jackie was below, beside a copper urn that had held a fern in his childhood house, and there were other things jamming up the hallway too: a coat rack full of overcoats and ski jackets, some of Elaine’s CDs, their cases smashed, and several Cuisinarts from the hardware store. Jackie mounted the stairs to take Pa’s elbow, but Pa lashed out at him with his cane. Stay back or I’ll brain you, he hissed.
“If we could convince him to stay here,” Jackie said to Karen the next morning, “we wouldn’t have this problem.”
Karen spun to look at him. “You know he won’t move.”
Karen still smarted from things Pa had said years ago about her family, though they were bricklayers at Saltcoats and only one of them—a distant uncle—had ended up in jail for a cheque kiting scheme. They were nothing for Pa to look down on. She got three hard-boiled eggs and set them out in red egg cups. The egg for Elaine looked hopeful, though they both knew that Elaine would not emerge from the bathroom for another twenty minutes, and probably would not eat the egg because she was watching her weight.
“I don’t understand,” Karen said, “how two grown men can go on like this, talking about a coffin.”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“It’s morbid, Jackie, that’s what it is. Morbid—plain and simple.”
Pa did die. It was Midge, coming up to fry his lunch, who discovered him. She ran for Jackie, who was measuring copper wire. Jackie sprinted from the shop and up the stairs. There was Pa, in his chair, by the window. His eyes were open but unseeing, and no breath moved his chest. It all seemed to Jackie like a last trick on Pa’s part. He could not shake this idea even as he told Midge to call the doctor.
Jackie stepped down the road and turned onto Princes Street, where, for the first time, he entered the Monroe funeral home. He rang the bell. Nick Monroe came from the back—the coffin showroom, no doubt. He was tall and lean and younger than Jackie: a track star, Jackie remembered now, good at the dash. His brother, Bob, who appeared and stood beside Nick, had been good at swimming. Small dark heads. Noses like clothes pegs.
“My father,” Jackie said. “He’s gone.”
Jackie felt almost elated by the oddness of it, the combination of portentous dignity and hollow strangeness in the act of saying, He’s gone—as though the old man had really done it this time, setting them on a course of preposterous mischief. Underneath were darker currents, logs piling up in a river. Jackie’s cheeks felt moist and cold, as if he had walked through fog.
The brothers seemed perturbed. Bereavement was mentioned. A framework for grieving. Assistance.
“I don’t care about all that,” Jackie said, picking up on why his father had set against these brothers. “Just bring the coffin,” he said.
The brothers consulted a dossier. They told him that his father’s wishes would be respected, but that prior to the visitation his father’s body must be brought to the funeral home for care. They would carry him on a stretcher, covered in a funereal cloth.
“Oh no you bloody don’t,” said Jackie. “He may need some fixing up here, prior to visitation, but he doesn’t leave that room except he’s in that coffin. Those were his wishes, plain as plain, though the stairwell is a tight one, as you’ll see for yourselves.”
How strange these words were, sung out by himself alone, without the force of his father’s will to back him. But they were enough. The Monroe brothers got the coffin, the Universal, with its metal fittings and white ash, and they carried it behind Jackie up Princes Street, past the Hole in the Wa’ pub, to the door to Pa’s rooms. Jackie went ahead of them up the stairs, poured himself a drink and sat down across from his father. He heard scraping and banging and swearing coming from the landing, then the Monroes emerged, sweating furiously. They laid the coffin, lidless, on the front room floor.
“Now mind, that lid must be hinged on tight when you leave.”
They looked at him as though he were mad, and the elder Monroe put a hand on the other’s elbow. Jackie narrowed his eyes with spite and turned back to his drink.
The two brothers set about their work, reattaching the lid, wiping the edging with a cloth. The satin caught the light from the casement and glowed, showing sheens of grey hidden in the nap. Pa was taken from his robe, and his slippers were exchanged for shoes and socks. As Nick Monroe knelt, pulling a sock over Pa’s hoary toenails, the certainty in Jackie washed out. They placed Pa in the coffin, then asked Jackie if he wanted a time alone with the deceased, but Jackie shook his head.
They heaved up the coffin.
At the kitchen door it wedged fast, and Jackie let out a single, painful sigh. They moved back into the kitchen, turned the coffin onto what m
ust have been less than a twenty-degree angle, and then they went at the door again, wiggling, adjusting for hinges, for girth. Through it slid.
Jackie heard their voices rising from the landing, advising each other to stay above the banister, to hold the coffin higher, to give a twist. “Just about,” he heard Nick Monroe say. “Easy now.” Then they were out, carrying the coffin down Princes Street toward the funeral home.
The entire departure took less than seven minutes.
In the years to come, Jackie told the coffin story half a dozen times at the pub, but it never came out right. People didn’t understand. Once someone told him he shouldn’t make fun of his old man. Let him rest in peace, they said, which made no sense at all. Another time the conversation drifted to the narrowness of stairwells, how the new houses were better than the older ones, for exactly that reason. Once his daughter, Elaine, who was older now, and sweeter, put a hand on his arm. “It’s a lovely story, Dad,” she said. “And wouldn’t Pa have been shocked to see how easy his coffin went round the corner, after all that worrying. He should have been there, eh, Dad?” But of course that was not the point either.
Karen worked the counter every day now, and Elaine, who had been to business school in Glasgow, managed the books so effectively, and got along so well with her mother, that Jackie sometimes didn’t go to the shop until mid-afternoon. Elaine had come up with all sorts of ideas for making the place more up to date, even changing the name back to Hobbes’ Ironmongery, which did seem to attract the upscale clients looking for vintage doorknobs, and claw feet for their bathtubs.
Jackie would read the paper in the sunroom, then walk from the suburbs to Princes Street, then along to the docks. He noted the freighters, trying to guess which were Clyde built. Staring out at the seagulls circling the fish boats, he remembered the days bent over the coffin drawings. His father so fierce, jubilant even, as though he would cheat death with his coffin ploy. Was that it? Not quite. There was something else at the heart of the story, some lesson that Jackie felt he almost understood.
He remembered the sun falling slantwise through the casement, both of them bent over the drawing, studying it carefully. The quiet fascination, motes of dust floating above the carpet. Ice melting in a glass. That his father would have troubled himself like this, poring over each of Jackie’s drawings, showing him how to face seaward, if you could call it that, face into the wind, like a sea captain facing into a gale, while never letting on how dire it was, this came to Jackie to seem extraordinary.
And so, in the end, the coffin story wasn’t something others needed to understand. Jackie understood it. And it gave his days a quiet satisfaction, turning from the dock, walking back up the street past the pub and pork butchers, toward the shop. The old man was right, Jackie thought, grimly pleased to have arrived at this place, holding the puzzle in his own hands now. The whole damned thing is harder than it looks.
The Wind
Shulamith leaned across the kitchen table and gazed into her friend Nancy’s eyes. Nancy wondered if Shulamith intended to speak at all. She seemed as though she might just sit there, yogically balanced on her erect spine.
“I’m afraid,” Shulamith said at last. “Really afraid.”
“Of what? Tell me.”
“You know, I’m afraid to even talk about it. I don’t want to make it more real.”
“You’ve got to talk it through,” Nancy said. “Besides, why did I come all this way if you don’t want to tell me?”
Shulamith gave Nancy a piercing look of sorrow, and then pulled back her ferocious golden and red curls. God, thought Nancy, Shulamith could make any state look enviable. Even severe distress. Even heartbreak. Still, Nancy was excited to hear what Shulamith’s dilemma was. Her belly tightened, and the light through the kitchen window actually altered. The sun must have gone behind a cloud then reappeared, revamped, ready for action.
They were in Shulamith’s kitchen on Galiano Island. Nancy had arrived several days early for their climate change meeting because Shulamith had told her on the phone that she needed help. Fine. Nancy was good at helping. Now here they were sipping Body & Soul tea from bumpily glazed island mugs—the table laid with honey pot, dipper stick, cream in a little pitcher shaped like a cow.
“All right,” said Shulamith. “It’s Ramsey.”
Ramsey was Shulamith’s five-year-old son. Nancy felt a surge of disappointment.
Shulamith must have caught it, because she reached for the honey pot and said, “You thought it was going to be about Charlie.”
“Not necessarily.” Nancy’s heart was beating faster, as it always did at the mention of Charlie.
“It’s usually Charlie—let’s face it.”
Charlie was Shulamith’s husband. He was part Cherokee, with a shaved head, broad shoulders, a thin waist, and a habit of laughing softly at Nancy’s jokes. He was also the source of numerous infidelities, painstakingly related at this same table.
“No. This time it’s Ramsey. My baby.” Shulamith tucked one foot up on the chair, under her bum, an expert gesture practised, Nancy thought, since Grade Four: how the cool girls used to sit as they coloured with their peacock and magenta crayons.
“So what is it? What’s happened?”
“I’m afraid you’ll laugh.”
“Why on earth would I laugh—you’re obviously upset. Besides, I never laugh where Ramsey’s concerned.”
A pause. Then Shulamith said: “He’s afraid to go outside.”
“You’re serious.”
“I’m serious.”
The two women looked at each other, and then they both burst out laughing, though Shulamith had a stricken look in her eyes, and Nancy’s laugh sounded a bit too much like a hoot of derision. It was just so ironic. Shulamith and Charlie had moved to this island so that Ramsey could run across shell beaches, hardening the soles of his bare feet, swim naked at night in the phosphorescence. Be a wild child. The ferry ride complicated Shulamith’s work, but Nancy, who was on the personnel committee of their organization, had backed her up. (Charlie, a guitar maker, didn’t have to explain why he wanted to live on an island. Guitar makers always wanted to live on islands.)
“They’re all coming,” Shulamith said. “The whole campaign team. And they’ll be like, ‘Let’s go kayaking,’ or ‘Let’s go hike Bodega Ridge,’ and Ramsey will start crying, and I’ll have to look at them and say, ‘Actually, we don’t go outside anymore—my son hates nature.’”
“Who cares what they say?”
“I know. You’re right. It’s just that they’re always looking for ways to poke holes in me.”
“No, they’re not.”
“Anyway, you’re right: it’s not the point. Not close to the point.”
Shulamith sat up tall. She was five foot ten, and when she closed her eyes and swayed slightly, she was like a cobra about to strike. “The real point is—what is going on inside Ramsey?”
“You must have talked to him.”
“He won’t say.”
“What about that cougar you told me about. Do you think he heard about that?”
A cougar had recently swum across from Vancouver Island and killed three sheep, but Shulamith sloughed that off: “If it was the cougar we’d all be fine. I mean everyone’s afraid of a cougar. They’re fucking deadly. But that cougar is long gone. It’s something else.”
Again Shulamith closed her eyes, the better to pick up the vibrational meaning of her son’s fear. She said, “I sometimes wonder if he’s got it from us. We’re always talking about the earth—the ice cap melting, polar bears dying, trees getting hit with spruce beetles. It’s all so awful, twenty-four seven. And I was so sad after the Copenhagen Summit, I think I may—we may—have instilled our fear in him. And so now, he just doesn’t want to look at nature at all. It frightens him because everything’s sick.”
“Like being at the bedside
of a dying aunt,” Nancy offered.
“Exactly. You know, I have to take the car to pick him up after school. If I so much as tell him we’re walking, he throws himself onto the floor and rolls up in a ball. Once, after he calmed down, he went to the schoolhouse door and opened it a crack and listened. Just stood and listened. It was the eeriest thing.”
Nancy could picture Ramsey clutching the door handle, his virgin-rain-forest curls falling to his shoulders. They had never been touched by scissors. His lips were absurdly kissable, like Marilyn Monroe lips, and his soft, brown cheeks—if you laid your own cheek against them they were cool and plump, though lately Nancy had noticed the beginning of his thinner, boy’s face emerging out of the preschooler’s roundness.
“What was he listening for?”
“I don’t know. There’s so much about the weather that’s so wrong now. Toxins. Storms caused by climate change.” Shulamith shook her head. “Can you pick him up today, after school? Maybe you can find out what’s going on. He loves his auntie Nan. Just make sure to take the car.”
“I’ll walk.”
“No way. He won’t go.”
“I’ll be fine. I have my ways.”
Shulamith reached out and placed both her hands over Nancy’s. “You really are my best friend, you know,” she said. “I can’t talk to Charlie about it at all. He just thinks I’m to blame for fussing too much. Or getting too sad about the planet. But I don’t think—”
“You’re not to blame, Shulamith. Really.”
Shulamith nodded, but she looked as though she were drowning, and it was up to Nancy—blond, cheerful Nancy—to save her. Nancy with her dykishly cut hair, though she wasn’t a dyke, and her tattered T-shirt and jeans. If she were fifteen pounds lighter she would be really good looking, that was what people said, good looking in a Doris Day kind of way. Freckles and good cheer. But she wasn’t fifteen pounds lighter.
“It’s nothing you’ve done,” Nancy said adamantly, “don’t worry.”
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