A Feast of Brief Hopes

by Bruce Meyer

  Maybe that was it, but the feeling that something else, perhaps someone else, was there beside him, tears at Rich.

  “You know, honey, we were all in the lake, fishing you out first because we saw your head bleeding and then we went back in after Martha when she was motionless.”

  At last, Rich fought long enough to stay in the dream — the sunset, the toast, the path down to the dock, the fall off the dock, the feeling of something impacting on his head — then he saw what he knew was there.

  A boy reached out for him. The boy had sad eyes, but his flesh was tight against his bones as if he had starved to death. The boy opened his mouth and tried to speak to him. He knew what the boy was saying. Sadness. His jaw tried to cry and all that poured out was sadness. Rich wanted to scream, but just as if he was trying to shout underwater, a scream in a dream is impossible. Was it a scream of pain? No, he did not think so. It was a scream of companionship, that was the only way to explain it. Companionship. They understood each other. He understood what the boy knew.

  Two women are standing with the boy on his dock. Rich thinks, but isn’t sure, that they are the women who once owned cottages where his post and beam place now stands. They are pointing to a new, green, fibreglass canoe. The boy feels tremendously happy. He looks up at his own cottage, the third in the row of four atop the rocky crest at the end of the road where the paving stops, and thinks he should ask his mother, but she is nowhere to be seen.

  “Isn’t this your son’s new canoe?” the boy asks one of the women.

  “He’s spoiled. He bought it and then he says he doesn’t want it, so it is yours. I’m giving it to you as a present. Go ahead. Try it out. Long, slow strokes. You’ll love it. It will be fun. You’ll be a voyageur, just like your ancestors. You will discover the north. You will fathom all the magic and mystery this place holds. You might find that missing gold out there somewhere. Dave Willows says it is the lake’s treasure. You heard him say that at the trading post the other day. Maybe they’ll name a bay after you when you find it.”

  The two women pick the canoe up by the bow and the stern and lay it in the water. One of them bends down to steady it as the boy steps in, pressing his shaking wrists on the gunwales as they hand the paddle to him. The canoe rocks beneath his weight and he struggles to balance it while holding on to the tire bumper.

  “Careful. You don’t want to tip. The balance will come,” the woman says while the other is silent, staring at him, staring into him. “It is easy.”

  He kneels as if he is praying. They hand the boy the paddle. He places the paddle on the gunwales of the canoe, then raises it and dips it in the water.

  “Go now,” the woman who has been silent says. Her voice is raspy. “Go now. Eternal mysteries are waiting for you out there in the lake.”

  He dips his paddle in the water, and tiny drops fall from each stroke.

  The Good Old Days

  I was standing in the corner with a drink in my hand. I had just finished a discussion about a current project that was nearing completion when across the room I saw a woman who looked very familiar. She was tall, elegant, with brown hair in a page-boy, and a freckled complexion. I nodded and she nodded back.

  We approached through the crowd and spoke. “How have you been?” she asked.

  “Busy lately.” Then, and I don’t know why, I added: “Do you do much travelling these days?”

  She looked puzzled and cocked her head to one side. “No,” she replied with hesitation. “I’m on a school teacher’s salary at a local girl’s academy and I rarely have enough left over to do much.”

  “But you always had money, didn’t you?”

  “No.” She started sizing me up and I read in her face the same look of disconnection that she must have seen in mine.

  “But just now, I pictured you in my mind. You were standing beside a fountain in Italy … I’m not sure which fountain, but it is in a square. Your hair is slightly different — you still have the same page-boy cut, but I seem to recollect that I saw you wearing a large sun hat with a turquoise ribbon through the brim and the bow tied under your chin.”

  “I’m beginning to think we’ve never met. I’ve never been to Italy. You’re mistaking me for someone else.”

  I apologized and we bantered about writing for a few minutes before someone grabbed my elbow. I offered to look at her short stories and give her some suggestions — the reflected wisdom of a literary scholar. On my way home I could not get over the very unsettling feeling that comes when I’ve run into people who I feel, deep down, that I know and have known well. It happened several times in the past few months. A colleague’s husband and I almost shut down a party because we both knew that we had been to the same place, though we couldn’t name it or say where, and we knew small details about each other. I got his telephone number and told him we would sort it out. As he was leaving, he turned to me. “Do you still have a black border collie?”

  “I do!”

  “She never leaves your side, does she? She’s always there.”

  At home after that peculiar gathering, I sat on the couch with my dog beside me. The old wisdom goes that one does not choose the dog, the dog chooses you. I buy that. Dogs have instincts and they read people better than we read ourselves. I put my head back and closed my eyes. The dog curled up next to me. I was not sure what it was I should be remembering.

  The old dream that keeps coming back visits me again. I am walking along a hillside road. I look over the valley below and on the other side is a stone cottage with two gables poking from the slate roof. As the road ahead of me climbs, I see a man leaning on his wooden rake … or is it a scythe? He is wearing a white shirt and a black vest and dark, baggy pants. He is cutting the chaff and weeds from the roadside. He takes off his pork-pie cap to mop is brow. He has white hair. The dog and I approach him.

  “When will you be going?” he always asks.

  “Soon,” I say. “Any day now.” I bend down to pat the dog that has come out of the brush to nuzzle my legs. I am wearing khaki jodhpurs and tall brown riding boots. My shirt sleeve is a blue and white stripe, and I notice where the tops of my braces fasten into the trousers.

  As usual, something wakes me at that point. The dog stirs and growls out the window. Every time the dream visits me I try to go back, try to see what happens next, but I am pulled by the world of my conscious reality, by my responsibilities and obligations here. But I think about the man. I know him. He is my colleague’s husband who shares the sense that we have known each other somewhere. My right shoulder aches as I think about the man’s face. I have known him all my life.

  I telephone my cousin who is an experimental psychologist. She loves to dabble in dreams and dream therapy. She tells me my recurring dream could be a past life experience. “Are you hiding something?” she asks. “Have any unfinished business from long ago?”

  “I don’t know. It was not my business, at least not as I know my business now.”

  “You should consider having a past life regression.”

  “Why?” I say. “I’m regressive enough in this life.” But the thought of finding out what is hiding inside me is a powerful temptation. I can’t keep my mind off the khaki jodhpurs and the brown riding boots. They were officers’ standard dress during the First World War.

  As a young boy my parents took me to meet the Prime Minister in Ottawa. He signed my autograph book in the House of Commons. Afterwards, they took me to the War Museum. There was a replica dugout set up there so that visitors could understand what the war had been like. The floors, however, were neatly swept concrete and the room with its eerie blue half light glowing as if just past sunset over No-Man’s Land was punctuated by a Lewis gun propped above the parapet. I stood there transfixed. I hated the place yet did not want to leave. I felt I couldn’t. My mother came looking for me.

  “We’ve been all over the place. Have you been here the entire time? You’re missing Brock’s tunic and sash.”

  “The da
mn gun is jammed,” I retorted in a harsh tone. “I can’t change the canister.” I wrestled with the gun. “Who disabled this? Who? Who!” She grabbed my arm and dragged me out. That is when the dream started chasing me.

  The woman I met at the party, the woman I felt I had known somewhere, emailed me some of her writing. She had written a story about a young woman in Rome. She and her new husband were on their honeymoon. The brilliant sunlight and the gentle heat of an Italian spring seemed to last forever, and they stood beside the decorated fountain and clutched each other’s arms as pigeons circled above them sounding the flutter of angels’ wings. “Make it last forever,” the character said to her smiling spouse. “Make it last forever.”

  I emailed her with some suggestions once I had read the manuscript. “I thought you said you had never been to Italy,” I noted in my email.

  She wrote back to me: “I haven’t. I was writing about a dream I keep having.”

  “And the husband in the dream, the one in the tweed suit and the Panama hat … what era is that set in?” I knew it was Edwardian. She did not respond to my message for several days.

  “I am sorry for not replying sooner, but I’ve had the dream again and I saw the man more carefully this time. He had your face.”

  Her email was unsettling, and I was uneasy answering it until I woke the next morning. My dream had come again, but this time it was much longer.

  The scene of the man on the road is only the middle of the larger story that visits me. A woman with dark, short hair cut in a page-boy is standing beside me at the altar of a small country church. She reaches out for my hand. I remove a pair of brown gloves and place them inside my officer’s cap that another man is holding though I cannot see his face. And as I take her hands in mine, I look up and through the veil I see her — the face and eyes of the woman from the party. As we leave the church and people are standing around us, cajoling and laughing, I whisper to her: “Time is so short.” Tears well up in her eyes. I lean close and kiss her and the gathered friends cheer in unison.

  The room with the heavy comforter on the bed is warmed by a small fire. There are birds singing in the eaves or far out on the grassy hillsides, and when I rise to look out the window, I see a landscape stripped of its trees, the mountains rising and falling in the distance as if the whole world is alive and breathing. And I hear the breathing of someone in the room with me, and it is her. The coverlet has slipped from her shoulders and I look on the moment with wonder that moves me to the core of my being. I think: “I shall take this with me to the end.”

  I am suddenly flooded by images I do not understand, but I know them from her stories. She has a better memory of that part of the dream than I. Then the road appears again. I am with the dog that will not leave my side. I pass through the dugout of the War Museum.

  There are shouts I cannot decipher and pangs of exhaustion. I am sitting on a wooden firing step. My breath is curling as if a cloud in front of me. There is a young man beside me. His eyes are grey, and wide, and innocent, and he is shivering. He whispers: “I’m so cold, Lieutenant. What I wouldn’t give for a bowl of me Mom’s soup.” I pat him on the knee. “I know what a warm hearth would do for me right now, and a warm bed, and my warm wife.” The air is incredibly still. The world is incredibly quiet and calm. Inside I feel as if I have nothing to fear any longer.

  “Sir,” says the young man who has mud speckled among his freckles, “will it always be like this? Do you think that we’ve missed out on life and are just here forever?”

  “No. It will pass. Just think of the good old days. There’ll be more of those.” And suddenly, it all goes black. I have not lost the dream. The dream and I are still joined. I feel as if I am flying but I am not sure which way is up. The young man is in front of me and before I can grab him to hold me down, he passes through me, through my right shoulder, and we thud back down to earth and the earth thuds on top, drowning us. And I see the stone cottage again, and the hillside road, and the dog walking up and down the road as if the pup is searching for something, and comes to greet me. She sits in front of me and turns her head, as if puzzled, as if trying to figure an answer to something I have asked and she cannot fathom.

  When I woke, I immediately thought that I had to do something for the three of us. I telephoned the school teacher. “I had the dream again. I read your stories. This is going to sound incredibly strange, but there is someone you have to meet. And we need to talk.”

  I phoned my colleague’s husband. He had been having dreams about a young woman who he had failed terribly. “I know where we can have lunch. Can you? There is someone I am going to bring along and you need to meet her.” We all agreed to gather in a late-day breakfast place on Bloor.

  I arrived first, then the teacher, and then the colleague’s husband. Once we had taken off our coats and blown into our hands to warm them against the winter midday, we stared at each other. The teacher and the colleague’s husband pointed and exclaimed in unison: “I know you.” We talked together in low voices. We shared each other’s dreams. My colleague’s husband wept as he concluded his narrative. He looked into the eyes of the teacher.

  “I am so sorry that I brought you the telegram. I wish there was something I could have done. I sat at the table all night but had no idea you did what you did upstairs.”

  The teacher is weeping. I am choked and have put my head in my hands. “So you did that to be with me? Why?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. Perhaps it was the thought that love would carry over whatever stood between us and that we would be together again.”

  “Well, I guess that has happened. But I don’t see any attraction now between us other than the fact that we are here and sharing coincidental dreams that have troubled us for years.”

  “I don’t feel anything either,” she replied.

  “Perhaps,” my colleague’s husband said haltingly as tears flowed down his cheeks, “we are here … leading our own lives … all we are doing is giving each other permission to forge ahead … ahead with this reality before we go our separate ways … not to carry grief with us to the end of the world and beyond.” Crying, we joined hands and nodded to each other for reassurance.

  “Maybe, today, these days, our days here and now, are the good old days we longed for once but never thought we could regain.” Everyone nodded, partially in agreement and partially, in a strange way, out of a sense of regret for what we could not bring to resolution, the lives we once had and left behind. We finished our meal, rose, hugged each other, promised to get together again, though that will not likely happen, and went our separate ways.

  That night, I arrived home, exhausted and cold, and took the dog for a walk up the Avenue Road hill. As we sat on the couch I rubbed her tummy. “Well, pupsicle, did you have a good day? I missed you.” She looked into my eyes and nuzzled closer to my thigh.

  I remembered the day I bought her from a farm north of the city. The farmer’s wife had two dogs. When she undid the leashes, the other dog ran away but the little black one, who most resembled a border collie, ran up to me and wrapped her front paws around my leg. The dog chose me as if she had always known me. She has followed me around the house and on my travels ever since that day we met, and there are times when I have the strange sense she will always be my dog.

  Visitors

  I know the decorative oval window half way up the staircase.

  The panes spread out in arms from the centre of the glass in a web pattern.

  When sun flowed down the stairs into the parlour, I could have seen a spider shadow cross the rug.

  Hollyhocks, blue, yellow, pink, leaned against a trellis in the garden. The parlour was furnished with antique chairs and china vase lamps. Water-colour pictures of woodland scenes hung on the yellow wall paper. On the mantle there was a clock that ticked and chimed on the hour and the half hour as the shadow of the web crossed the room during a summer afternoon.

  A woman who looked like my grandmother was scolding m
e. I had done something wrong. I ran into the bedroom where the hob-tufted spread stretched over the brown antique bed frame. I put my face in the pillow. I did not want to look at her. I never liked to be scolded, especially by someone I did not know.

  When the scolding was over I was told I could go outside to the garden. An elderly man was bending over the flower beds. He was picking brown heads from the flowers and tossing them in a galvanized bucket. I bent down to look at the bucket because it reminded me of frost on window panes — the jagged shards gleamed and caught the light.

  He said to me: “Stand back or you might get something in your eye.” I stood up and followed him to the end of the garden.

  There was a shed at the end of the garden scented with turpentine and earth where spider webs stuck to my fingers. The shed was painted dark green inside and out, and on the floor were cans where tears of the paint had run down the side and dried before they reached the ground.

  In the corner was a workbench, and a hammer with a round, ball end to it was resting among the other tools — a saw, a rusty chisel. I felt the edge of the wooden workbench.

  “Be careful,” he said, “you might get a sliver.”

  We walked back into the house. The woman who was scolding me was drawing a pan of cookies from the oven. The kitchen smelled of gingerbread. The air was sweet. “These will cool by the time your parents get here, and you can take some with you.”

  I wanted to touch them, but I knew the silver cookie sheet was hot, so I waited.

  The yellow kitchen chairs had hoops atop them that were fed with spindles that grew out of the seat. Whoever made the chairs had carved the shape of someone’s bottom into the wood.

  I ran my hand over the rise and fall of the chair’s indentation. “What do you call this?” I asked.