A Feast of Brief Hopes

by Bruce Meyer

  The previous winter had been the hardest. Luke was mobile then. The invader had not yet settled in his spine, and when the moon shone through the glass of their balcony doors in the dawn hours of still February mornings, Luke would wake and pine to be let out to visit his shadows. Paul would delay him as long as he could with stories that made Luke smile; but inevitably, Luke would go out.

  Paul would follow him at a safe distance through the ice-covered alleyways behind Church Street. The longer Paul could keep Luke at home, the less likely it was that his partner would find a stray staggering in the darkness, a helpless straggler who either had no home or could not return to one he knew. Paul would follow at a safe distance. Luke would approach the stray young man, and Paul would remain in the shadows though he could often see the streetlight or the light from a window reflected in the eyes of the straggler. When Luke would return home at dawn, he would ask Paul to tell him the story of how the man dog came into being. Paul knew that, if Luke woke, he would want to hear that story again.

  Luke did wake from his sleep. He had not woken for five days. Paul thought Luke’s last words were going to be about wanting to smell steak cooking in the kitchen. Paul grilled another so the aroma would please Luke, but when he returned to ask Luke what he thought of the steak he found his partner unresponsive. That had been more than two weeks ago. Paul could not remember exactly, though. Luke’s breathing was a series of gasps. They were awful. They sounded hollow. Paul had promised Luke a death at home and no matter how his loved one suffered, he had to remain true to that promise.

  Couples gathered in the bars and restaurants along the main drag for their Friday night revels. Paul could hear the traffic and voices from the street below. Music came from one of the bars. The dark hours of the morning before the sunrise, after the restaurants had shuttered and the bars had turned off their lights, would have been Luke’s time to go out. As Paul entered the room to sit by his partner and listen to the sound of his laboured breathing fade into the night, Luke spoke. He asked if the steak had been good. The question startled Paul. The nearly dead are not supposed to speak when they are given up for dead. Perhaps this is what is known as the final rally. He asked Paul to tell him a story. Paul pulled drew a chair closer to Luke’s bed so he could bend over and whisper the story.

  Once upon a time, Paul began, there was a little boy who loved to dress in red capes like the one he had found in a baker’s shop where they made buttery crescent rolls and warm buns each morning before dawn. The boy would go out in the darkness to prowl, for the hour or so before dawn is when one sees the shadows of the dead and dances with them. It is the hour when bakers rise to bake, when the first delivery trucks of vegetables arrive at the shuttered restaurants, when the emptiness of the streets makes one think that the world has died, and when the last lights from windows reveal lovers standing pressed against each other. Four in the morning was when the boy smelled the crescent rolls in the oven. They sprang to life magically in his senses as the first sign of day even before the sun rose.

  The baker had left one of his shop windows partially opened to cool off the room where he floured the table and stirred the mixing bowls to feed the enormous oven. The boy slipped into the shop, enticed by the scent that curled into the street. Though the rolls seemed to be magic to his nose and his stomach, they were not what he took from the baker.

  Instead of stealing the rolls on the cooling rack, as he thought he would, the boy’s eye caught a bundle of red clothes the baker had left just inside the shop door. Rolls, no matter how magic they might seem, would only last a day. Clothes could last a long time. The red clothes were made of satin, and the boy ran his fingers over them to feel how smooth they were as they caught the light of the dying moon trying to hide before the sun came looking for it with a vengeance to catch it and kill it. The boy crawled out through the partially opened window and took the clothes to a packing crate he called home behind the piano store.

  When the boy woke, he was hungry and wished he had stolen the rolls. He had fallen asleep but only briefly. His hunger had woken him. But his neck did not hurt because his head had been pillowed by the red bundle, and while he slept he had the most amazing dreams about flying, about becoming invisible, and of growing fangs and running through the woods as the starlight filled his head. He opened the bundle. A pair of trousers and a tight crimson top tumbled onto the floor of the piano crate, but best of all there was a hooded cowl and a mask that covered all but the eyes and gave him the appearance of a wolf. The boy put on the outfit. It would have been too small for the baker. It fit the boy perfectly. It became his second skin.

  The next night, when the bars and restaurants were closing, and the moon was rising over the streets as he ran toward the valley at the city’s edge — he always sensed he ran faster at night than during the day — the moon followed him until he reached the woods in the hollow. He saw the outline of the baker in the distance, shuffling along the path others had worn between the trees. But he had heard the baker had died the day before, had dropped dead in a frenzy while looking for his red costume and its wolf-like cowl that he wore when he went into the woods. When the boy saw the baker’s ghost, he thought the man had fallen into a box of flour. The baker was chuffing toward a ramshackle house in the clearing ahead. The boy thought it odd that the baker would be heading away from town at the hour when he would be going in the opposite direction to begin his day’s work, but the dead go to the woods and ponder their lives by moonlight and reflect on their shadows among the trees and fungal stumps.

  The baker was carrying a basket overflowing with rolls, so crammed that one crescent toppled out onto the path, and the baker stopped and kicked it under a clump of ferns. It had been meant as food for the dead — the baker’s dead lover who waited for him in the woods for years. But the boy was eager to follow the baker, not for loose rolls but for the aroma. The scent was even more intense among the trees than it had been in the bakery. It filled the boy’s senses and turned his brain into fire. A moment later, the boy found himself on top of the baker. The baker, at first, had not resisted because he was already a ghost, but he became annoyed and tried to tell the boy that the rolls were his, but no sound came out. The baker’s ghost sat down on a stump and cried while the boy ran off with the last baked goods his baker’s hands had made.

  Having strewn the rolls in a trail of crumbs so he could find his way out of the forest if the clouds covered the moon, the boy arrived at the small cottage that was the baker’s destination. The dwelling was one of the old mail order houses from the Twenties, but it had fallen into disrepair. The paint was peeling off the veranda, the railings and shingles that had once been yellow were brown and rotting in the blue shadows.

  The door was unlocked so the boy let himself in. He recognized the old man’s voice that called from a room at the back because it had the same dead rasp as the baker’s. The voice was asking if the baker had brought him his favourite buns. The boy stood in the doorway of the old man’s room, still clutching the baker’s basket. The old man smiled. That was the last the boy remembered or wanted to remember, though later, when dawn had come and he had returned to his piano crate in the alley, he remembered how the old man’s skin was soft yet creped, its draped flesh sagging from the dead bones. He recalled the aroma that disappeared from the rolls as they cooled. The rolls had left a trail of bread crumbs all the way home. They had stuck to his cape and fallen off as he ran from the old man’s house. He tried to follow them, but he heard the catchers coming close, and he hid breathlessly in the underbrush, not knowing which way was out of the labyrinth of trees.

  When the sun came up, he took a guess and followed a trail of current buns that someone had made before him — possibly the piano man who knew the forest better than he did — and with a stroke of luck, found his way back to town. Forests are full of bread crumb trails and most are like the invader that gets inside a person. Very few are worth following and even fewer lead to anything more than death.<
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  Luke muttered that he did not want to know what would come next. He did not want to hear about the catcher who would find the boy and take him to a brightly lit room where the catcher would question and question him until he broke down and sobbed a false confession about stealing rolls and murdering bakers and old men. Through mumbles, he asked Paul to tell him another one, a different one, though Paul had to lean into him to hear because his partner’s voice was weak and raspy from disuse and from the invader inside him. Luke whispered that he knew there were always two shadows following the boy in the red cape: the catcher, and the piano man who once owned the crate. One would do him harm, and the other would lead him back to his hideaway behind the piano store.

  Paul asked if he wanted to hear the story about the first Prince of Wales, and how the king, on discovering his son’s cradle overturned and the English collie standing by it, slew the dog, though the dog had saved the baby from a snake and dragged the child to safety. Paul added that the child never smiled again. Luke replied that the story was no fair to the dog, and then he closed his eyes, and returned to sleep. Paul had wanted to tell him that the story would be different this time, that the dog would kill the king and initiate a line of dog despots who would rule over England until their blood-lineage was watered down to short-legged Corgis that simply yapped for applause. Luke would have liked that, but he was unconscious, and his breathing grew laboured and hollow.

  Luke’s sleep was long and deep after the story of the boy in the red cape. Paul could not remember how many days Luke had been asleep. Paul began to wonder where Luke’s dreams were taking him. Maybe Luke was retracing his steps through the back alleys behind the main drag, with Paul not far behind, until the morning nurse came to change the IV.

  After several hours when Luke said nothing, and his gasps became chortles, Paul took a needle from his sewing basket and pricked Luke’s thumb to see if he was still feeling anything, but Luke woke, and in a far away voice distant from life whispered to Paul that he was not Sleeping Beauty. He then asked why the stories had stopped.

  There were many summer nights, Paul recalled. The air was heavy with humidity before a downpour washed the night away into the shining gutters. The leaves updrafted on maples. They rattled like bones or the whispers of those who saw and knew what Luke had done in Paul’s stories, the faces that populated Luke’s imagination but dared not speak of it to each other. The fair-minded wanted justice, but the thrill of knowing that someone was running, someone was in the streets living not out of the dream but beyond it, and beyond any law or stricture, was almost mouth-watering. The dream was real to them, as real as it was to Luke and Paul. So, Paul continued his story …

  The moon would appear from behind a cloud, and Paul’s long-haired lover would scratch at the door to get out. Paul knew Luke had once owned a red Irish setter, an excitable dog that would scratch at the door, wanting out for a run in the middle of the night. Luke had loved that dog until one of the neighbours from the old days shot it with a cross bow.

  Luke had never wanted revenge against the neighbour. His friends of the time told him to nail the neighbour’s doors shut and set the house on fire, but Luke had simply ignored that temptation. Vengeance would prove nothing. Instead, he tried to remember what the dog had seen and done as he wandered out alone at night. The good boy must have been aware that he was being watched by the catcher, but there was always someone who would bend and pet the dog, not prey but a friend, and sometimes the friend would have a piece of freeze-dried steak in his pocket to feed the setter. But when the dog hungered, the red dog, the boy in the red cape, both good boys wanting to be petted and loved — he would bare his fangs at the smaller, helpless dogs, the ones that men carried in their purses or tucked under their arms at cash registers. They were white, fearful, and uncertain. They yapped and barked, but said nothing. Those were the dogs the setter wanted to claim. They were dogs that had no business being out at night.

  Paul had followed Luke on his runs in the night not merely because he acted as lookout when Luke overtook the boys who at first welcomed the advances but then became terrified. Paul would watch as Luke would turn and glance over his shoulder to make sure the catcher was not nearby.

  But the catcher was always out there. If it could not collar a fast, good boy, it would find a way to take him down from inside.

  That was the way Luke explained it.

  They were cruel beings, those catchers. They wore navy blue uniforms to hide themselves in the darkness. They passed from one person to another in the darkness. They would go straight for the blood. They carried rule books in their back pockets, lists of things to do and not do, scrolls of medications and tests they could recite chapter and verse.

  If Luke got ahead and disappeared from sight, Paul would go directly home, wait anxiously, meet his exhausted friend at the apartment door. Paul would stick his head out the apartment door and look up and down the silent hallway to make sure Luke had not been followed by a catcher. Often, Luke would come home soaked, having cleaned himself with someone’s garden hose or in a backyard fountain.

  When they were both certain that the invader was with them for the long-haul, Luke would sit down each morning to his breakfast of champions — a dish of a dozen or more pills of various colours — with a new story from Paul told over eggs Benedict.

  Paul would conjure the characters who went into the forest, but unlike those in the old fairy tales, they would never emerge because the forest belongs to the dead. There was always something larger in the brambles, something far more emphatic than a wolf or a bear, something to hate as much as porridge. Paul knew Luke hated porridge. The story would always end with the boy in the red cape returning home to the piano man who would rub his hair as the boy laid his head on the piano man’s knee. The piano man would stare down at the boy, tell him he was a good boy, and remind him to go to sleep after a long night. The piano man would play Brahms’ Waltz in A Flat as the boy in the red cape would fall asleep. The piano man would assure the boy in the red cape that the catcher would not catch him though many nights he came close, that the boy in the cape was invincible and imperishable, and that no matter who or what came to visit him and tear his world apart from inside, the piano man would always be there to rescue him from harm.

  The story came to an end. Paul had been holding Luke’s hand all night until a breathless silence fell upon the room. It was four a.m. when Paul stood up, walked into the living room of their apartment, sat down at the baby grand that almost filled the window, and softly played the notes of their favourite waltz. Paul closed his eyes and saw a vision that would make the start of a good story, an image of sinking moonlight that once upon a time had broken through the grey clouds.

  Chance

  Once Upon a Time …

  There was a castle that stood on the shores of a beautiful, shimmering lake where young men and young women went to experience the possibilities of enchantment and happily-ever-afters. To those who had been there and danced the night away, the castle was nothing more than the old, turreted home of a Victorian lumber baron who transformed the stately first growth forests of the Haliburton highlands into hills of saplings and knuckles of moss-patched rolling outcrops. Only the lakes remained. When his grandsons inherited the estate and the hardscrabble landscape around it, they took their chances and built a pier far out into the lake and set a dancehall there as the crown jewel of their resort.

  There was also a time when the world of Toronto society was a small place, so small that chance took up where acquaintance left off in bringing people together. But most of the time, it was acquaintance that brought couples together so that life in the city became a matter of life among people who were and always would be familiars. For those who found social familiarity troubling — some say it can lead to contempt — the alternative for meeting eligible others was chance, and there was still enough room in the social web of Muddy York for a footprint on a garden path to become a glass slipper. Even if fami
lies had known each other for generations, sailed to this land aboard the same ships, built and walked the same streets for almost a century, the world of Toronto society was still small enough in some ways for people to almost meet but not until they permitted chance to intervene and guide their destiny. In order to let chance take its course, there had to be special places where, in the magic of a late summer night and a full moon shimmering on a northern lake, the stiff and proper world of the city would let down its guard and let nature take its course.

  In A Land Far, Far Away …

  The Wendigo Inn was advertised as a place for young people to get-away for a magical week off from the offices and corridors and the crowded buses that crisscrossed the grid of the city. It was not far from Toronto, yet just far enough as to seem away, and that is what attracted the young secretary as she sat at her desk in the Conservatory of Music one spring evening and decided that her weeklong vacation in September would be spent on the shores of the glistening lake. The Inn was known for its beautiful trails where, if a young couple were to meet, they could get to know each other during casual strolls. There were rocks that nature had placed very carefully where they could sit and talk in the bright summer sun without having to be completely out of sight and completely out of the range of propriety as their relationship blossomed. It was paradise, just an hour or so’s drive from the commotion of daily life.