Waiting for Joe

by Sandra Birdsell

  “About what?” Joe fears she wants to talk about money. Alfred’s pension doesn’t cover anything more than basic care, a haircut now and then, and his private phone line.

  “Your father is ninety-five years old,” she says and Joe wants to laugh. He thinks, my father has always been ninety-five years old.

  “I understand that you’re his only living relative.”

  “Yes,” Joe replies.

  “So you’ll need to let us know what your wishes are regarding your father’s health care.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  The line goes quiet, and for a moment Joe thinks they’ve been cut off, until she says, “What I mean to say is, the X-rays your father had this morning show that he’s developed pneumonia. We see this happen all the time with the residents. He is ninety-five,” she says again, as though Joe must face up to that fact. “Once this happens, it’s usually only a matter of time.”

  When Joe doesn’t reply, she continues. “Our facilities are more than adequate to keep your father comfortable. We can do the usual things, such as suction him, for example. But if you want more proactive care he’ll have to be hospitalized.”

  Joe is unable to breathe. The waitress approaches his booth with the carafe of coffee, and he shakes his head. “How soon do you need to know?”

  “The sooner the better. Now would be best.”

  “Let me talk to him,” Joe says, not knowing what else to say.

  “I believe he’s already tucked in for the night,” she says.

  “At eight o’clock?” Joe says.

  “It’s half-past. We kept him up as long as we could, but I’m afraid he ran out of steam. Let me go and see if he’s still awake.”

  A minute later she’s on the line again. “He’s here. I’ve given him a phone.”

  “Dad?” Joe says.

  “It’s me, Joe.”

  “I understand you’re under the weather.”

  “Who told you that?” Alfred’s words come out half formed, sounding wet.

  “The supervisor,” Joe says.

  “Just what did she say?”

  “You’re not wearing your chompers, are you?”

  “They make us take them out for the night.”

  Alfred has seldom gone without his dentures; it’s a matter of pride for him not to be seen without them. Joe winces inwardly as he recalls his father’s suitcase falling open during their struggle, the hollow clatter of those flesh-coloured wedges when they skittered across the floor.

  “The supervisor says you’ve got something on your chest,” Joe says.

  “That’s true. I do have something on my chest.”

  Joe hears a hollow sound, voices, a click, and then Alfred is back. “She’s gone,” he says. “We can talk now. So you’re in Regina then, and not Vancouver.”

  “What makes you think that?” Joe asks, startled.

  “Didn’t Laurie tell you she called?” Alfred says. “It was good to hear her voice.”

  Joe holds his breath waiting for Alfred to continue. He both dreads and wants to know what she might have said, what she’s feeling. Headlights sweep across the window of the restaurant as a car pulls into the parking lot, the glare stinging his eyes.

  “Laurie tells me you’ve got this temporary job. She sounded worried. When your man, Clayton, was here the other day, he said you’ve been bleeding money for years.”

  “Things have been tough.” Joe is relieved that Laurie hasn’t said anything about him not being with her.

  “Tough? I put two and two together. It’s not hard to figure that you’ve gone belly up,” Alfred interrupts.

  Belly up, like a gutted fish, fingers slick with slime and blood. Belly up, an expression from the Depression era. That’s Alfred. Way back there. Crude. Blunt as a hammer. His father.

  When Joe doesn’t reply, Alfred says, “Let’s not talk about this, Joe. It’s no one’s business but ours. There are too many ears around here. Don’t go through the desk when you call tomorrow. Call me directly.”

  In the moment of silence between them Joe hears the flutter of phlegm. “Dad? You still there? Everything okay?” he asks.

  “Everything is not okay, Joe, and we both know it. What are you doing in Regina, there’s nothing there.” And then, with vehemence, he adds, “For God’s sake come back, Joe. I need to go home.”

  “I know,” Joe says. “I know you do, Dad. I know. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  Five

  THE LITTLE SHITHEAD, Alfred thinks as he hangs up the telephone. His private term of endearment for Joe fails to defuse his exasperation at having stayed awake waiting for his call. He expects he’ll do the same tomorrow, wait for Joe. Waiting is not something he does very well. Not since he came to understand that people who kept him waiting were often telling him he was no more worthy of consideration than a coop of brainless chickens.

  He gropes for the lever on the side of the La-Z-Boy, a nuisance of a contraption if there ever was one. It’s designed to keep him put, but he surprised them and himself when he proved to have enough strength to tilt it back. It’s an easy thing to pull the lever and send himself flying upright, which he does now. Clear across the room one of these days.

  For a moment he’s gripped by a spasm of coughing that leaves his chest feeling squeezed. The young fellas in this place who stay up half the night playing cards in the solarium aren’t happy unless they’ve got something to gripe about. The yelling man has stopped yelling; either that means he’s shipped out, or been given something to keep his head down. The card players will be complaining about me, the coughing man, next.

  Okay, then, up and at it, he tells himself. He sees his reflection in the dark windowpane across the room, a knuckle of a man slowly and cautiously uncurling as he rises from the La-Z-Boy. After a moment he ventures off to his first stop, the metal chair, and reaches it. The Eagle has landed. Twice now, he’s had to tell the girl not to move the chair, which has become his way station to all parts of the room. He looks down at his hands clamped round the chair back, topographical maps, shrink-wrapped by skin the colour of brackish water.

  He sets off again and arrives at the window, its marble sill a jolt of cold against his palms. “One small step for man,” he says without the self-deprecating humour that usually accompanies his mutterings. In the window his eyes are startled and tufts of wiry hair shoot out from the sides of his head as though he’s shocked to have travelled the long dark distance between the earth and the moon, a ninety-five-year crossing. There’s only one in Deere Lodge who’s older than him, and like himself, he looks like a raisin with eyes. But while Alfred can’t remain still, that man is confined to a wheelchair and usually parked.

  The lamp on the bureau is a spot of light in the window, its metal shade the shape of an infantry helmet. He won the lamp at cards while working in the lumber camp before the war, and it’s the only relic he has from his bachelor days. Joe won’t want it. The lamp will likely wind up in a stranger’s house, or as landfill. Verna kept Joe’s baby teeth in an old face powder box thinking that one day she would show them to his children. Joe won’t want those either, but maybe Laurie will.

  He thinks of the plastic bag of dentures stowed among the socks and underwear in the bureau drawer; he should do something about them before he can’t. If he doesn’t, Laurie will have to deal with them and he doesn’t want that. He would chuck them in the bathroom garbage if it weren’t for the fact that he would likely be asked why he’d done so, and any answer he might give would be written down somewhere and added to the sum of his senility.

  If the house was on fire and you could only save one thing, what would it be? He’d once heard Laurie ask her friend this question, and it got him thinking. He’d saved four things. The lamp, Joe’s baby teeth, his dentures and the family portrait, which was Verna’s Centennial project. Saved her pennies and saw to the spit and polish one Saturday afternoon for the trip down to Simpson’s Photo Studio. Everyone in the country had a C
entennial project, why not them? Joe will want the photograph.

  The photo sits on the bureau lit by the lamp. Verna, alive as spring in a dress the colour of green apples. Joe’s young pale blue eyes shine into the future. He never let you get inside. Even now, when he’s got trouble, he’s too conceited to admit it, never mind ask for help. He might not want the lamp, or his baby teeth, but he’s sure to want the portfolio. The money from Verna’s life insurance policy is worth nearly a million bucks now. All Joe knows about is the twenty-some thousand locked in a GIC. The government had waited as long as they could for most of the Hong Kong vets to expire before coughing up compensation, but Alfred had outlasted them.

  The money, the house. Both will be handed to Joe on a platter. He’ll have the life of Riley. No kids to keep him awake, to fret over, to wind up with nothing to show for it but a kick in the pants. Why don’t you dig my grave and get it over with, he hears himself say to Joe. He still doesn’t know what got into him, the rage that had him by the throat. When it came time for him to go to Deere Lodge, he’d intended to speak his mind. I’m your father, and this is my house. I plan on leaving it feet first. He guesses that’s what got into him. A sudden and brief flare of anger that made him all arms and legs, pushing, pulling, swiping at Joe, when what he really set out to do was speak his mind. Instead, he’d foolishly tried to take Joe down.

  The city lights blur as though the window is running with rain, or Alfred is seeing them through cellular debris, the swamp that floats across his corneas. He’s heard that near to 80 percent of dust in a house is dead cells sloughed off by a person’s body throughout the years, and if that’s so, then there’s still a lot of him back home. Although the city is dark with night, and the vitreous scum clouds his vision, he imagines he sees the fringe of greenery above the rooftops, the forest of old elms in his neighbourhood that came from a single tree. That first one is gone now. Cut down by the city, no matter that a woman chained herself to it in protest.

  He sees himself wheeling Joe in the carriage along Arlington Street beneath the elms. In winter, he’d swaddled him in blankets and scarves, like a mummy, and pulled him on the sleigh. Wherever they went, people couldn’t help but notice Joe. Isn’t he perfect. A woman had said this when she looked at Joe, her eyes rising to Alfred’s face then, and he knew she’d decided he was too old and hardbitten to have produced such a beautiful, large and clear-skinned child, whose wide eyes took in everything and everyone as though he already knew who they were and nothing surprised him. Joe might well be a genius, Alfred had sometimes thought. There was no accounting for Joe and Verna’s presence in his life, other than Lady Luck. The kind of luck that turned up the exact card you needed to win a hand at cribbage.

  He feels Verna watching from the veranda as she usually did, as she had on the last day of her life, her fingers set against her mouth to keep from calling out. Don’t be too hard on him. A joke, that. Until recently, he’d never thought to raise a hand against Joe.

  In his lifetime he’d seen too much brutality to want to become a bookkeeper father tallying up the misdemeanours of a young boy. The neglect of his own parents had left him misshapen, like a tree that had grown in nothing but rock. The things he’d witnessed during the seven-hour suicidal battle to defend Hong Kong against the Japanese had made sleep a torture. He never knew when the nightmares might ambush him, just that they would, triggered sometimes by nothing more than going into a butcher shop and smelling freshly cut meat.

  He’d spent more than a thousand days and nights as a prisoner, first in Sham Shui Po, and then in Japan. In the greyness of dawn he was roused to go down into the pitch darkness of the mine shaft, and he emerged some twelve hours later when the sun had already set. On a clear night he could see stars, and sometimes the moon, through the cracks in the roof above his sleeping pallet. He’d come to the conclusion that there was no one out there, no God who was remotely interested in whether he lived or died. He didn’t tempt fate by claiming there was, as others had, only to be struck down by dysentery and diphtheria, or a rifle butt. He’d succeeded in going unnoticed, and he survived.

  None of this had made him indifferent to the suffering of others. Rather, it grieved him to see it. He’d been determined to spare Joe the indignity of injustice and injury—physical, or otherwise. It never once occurred to him that Joe might one day prove to be the source of both.

  He senses Verna’s thoughts flying down the street toward him, smacking him on what was, in those days, only a spot of baldness on the back of his head. He thinks to wave, but Verna is already turning away, already rising from the steps to go into the house and get a cold drink for Karen Rasmussen. Verna is already gone.

  And when he saw Verna’s lifeless face in the morgue he fell headlong into a well where he was swarmed by his thoughts, daylight being a lid across that well about the size of a dime, while at night the bottom grew deeper.

  Verna had rescued the man from the child he’d been, wretched with neglect. Once Joe came, he knew that to be true. Back when he was a kid, he’d thought his life was like any other, as he stuck his nose through the wire fence into the farmyard, hoping to catch a breath of fresh air when it passed by. When he got too big for his mother to carry on her back, his father penned him in the coop to keep him safe, to keep him clear of mischief while he, Alfred’s mother and his brothers went into town or to work out in the fields. As the half-assed chickens went at each others’ backsides, pecking one another featherless, he would think of his brothers, the way they pecked at one another until a scuffle broke out and they used their fists. Sometimes his father was right there in the middle of it. He’d been a child filled with hope and not despair, as he wished upon the face of the moon for the sight of the horses bringing the wagon and his family into the yard at the end of the day.

  Despair set in later when he occupied a desk at the back of a schoolroom and tried to hide the fact that he’d been hurt, that his ignorance was deep and abiding, that he was not like the others around him. Verna was only a pigtailed chit of a girl then, sitting at the front of the classroom, just one among all the other town kids he sought to avoid. He’d gone out to the farm for the last time when it was being sold. He’d wanted to see his brothers, who had come from across the country to shut down the house, but more than that, he wanted them to look at him and for once see him. He’d felt like a stranger as they sat around the kitchen table and recalled their youth as though he hadn’t been there. As though their young lives had been one long game of hockey they had survived, and they didn’t mind showing their scars.

  He hadn’t recognized Verna when he passed her on the street, it was only in the restaurant, when Ivy introduced herself and Verna, that he remembered her. She was taller than him, her dark hair already streaked with grey at the age of thirty-five. A quick-witted beanpole of a woman with a sense of humour a mile wide. Being with her was like being in a warm current of water while swimming in a cold northern lake. He stayed on in town after his brothers left, told himself it was as good a place as any to be haunted by the dead, especially the women, the nurses he’d come upon in the wards in the hospital in Hong Kong, raped and then bayonetted from stem to stern.

  Within months Verna gave her sisters notice. It was their turn to care for their aging parents, as she’d taken up with a man whose three toes were missing from frostbite, and who had an infection in his back that refused to heal. She planned on marrying him. When they returned from the Justice of the Peace, Verna took Alfred straight to the Indian woman’s shack outside of town. The woman had once made a paste that had healed the infected sores on Verna’s mother’s diabetic feet. The woman sniffed at the infection eating away at his back, then prepared a concoction that smelled like spruce gum. He and Verna went south to Winnipeg then, where she took him from doctor to doctor until they found one who put him on the thiamine treatment that kept his mind and heart steady. A year later when she was pregnant with Joe, he cashed in his share of the farm and what he’d saved while
working in the lumber camps, and bought the house on Arlington Street.

  When she died, it took months for him to find himself. He came out of the darkness one morning when the telephone wouldn’t stop ringing. It was like a pesky fly, dive-bombing his head in the way it would stop and start up again minutes later. He went downstairs, wondering why Joe wasn’t answering it. It was Earl calling, saying, “So my friend. What’s up? Are we still on, or not?” Earl had surprised him once by coming by the house soon after Verna died. Tell him I’m not up for a visit yet, Alfred had said to Joe. Earl was calling now to remind Alfred that since Verna’s passing he’d gone without his weekly ration of ale, and he wanted Alfred to make a run to the liquor store.

  “Grease those wheels and go and get it yourself,” Alfred said, as he looked about the kitchen and saw the dishes stacked, unwashed, in the sink, the cupboard doors gaping open, the floor littered with garbage.

  “I’ll be in the park, at the usual place,” Earl said and hung up.

  Earl’s call was a blunt reminder of how quickly the living went on doing just that, while the dead were just as quickly being discounted. Alfred took in the cluttered counter, the almost empty shelves in the cupboard. And as he passed through the living room, he saw Joe’s half-built Ferris wheel on the coffee table, the pile of clothes on the floor. The boy had left a glass of milk and a box of saltines on the TV.

  He realized that for too long, Joe had only been a sound moving about in the rooms below him. He’d been aware of the television being on far into the night. The times when hunger drew him downstairs, he sometimes came across a piece of paper with an arrow on it pointing to the sandwich Joe had prepared and left out on the arm of the easy chair. He was aware of Joe in the bedroom wanting money for school supplies, his weekly allowance; of the telephone messages he slid under the door, the paper that required a signature for him to participate in a project at school. At some point, Cecil, the boarder, had moved out. No more of Verna’s home cooking, and a house falling to rack and ruin.